2. born into an Anglo-Irish family in 1865 in Dublin
Father abandoned law to take up painting
Mother from Sligo, in the west of Ireland, where Yeats spent much of his childhood
Moved to London in 1874, then returned to Dublin in 1880
Founded Irish Literary Society in London and the National Literary Society in Dublin
Early work influenced by Spenser, Shelley and Blake

5. 1889 met Maud Gonne
1896 met Lady Gregory, Coole Park; began organizing the Irish dramatic movement; together founded Abbey Theater in 1904
1901—”everything hard and clear”
In 1902 a friend gave him the works of Nietzsche which, „intensified his search for a more active stance, a more vigorous style.”*
1904—no „sentiment and sentimental sadness”, poems that „carry the normal, passionate, reasoning self, the personality as a whole”
Easter Rising of 1916 „Man and the Echo”
1917 married Georgie Hyde Lees (elements of symbolic system in A Vision)
1922 appointed senator of Irish Free State
1929 „A Dialogue of Self and Soul” –embraced the mortal world, affirmed ruin and destruction as necessary to imaginative creation*
1939 died in France, buried near Sligo under Ben Bulben
*Norton Anthology

7. Thoor Ballylee, Yeats’ home

9. Early period: 1885-1902 „The Rose of the World”
Middle period: „Adam’s Curse”
Mature period: „Man and the echo”

10. • „Yeats described himself as a man who was naturally religious but whose Christian belief had been overturned by the scientific rationalism of the nineteenth century.” Oxford Illustrated history of English Literature, 383
• He said he, „made a new religion, almost an infallible church of poetic tradition.” Norton Anthology, 2019

11. --Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy
• „The most fundamental of these assumptions, which the Neoplatonists shared with the majority of intellectuals of the ancient world…is that mindful consciousness (nous, often translated as thought, intelligence, or intellect) is in an important sense ontologically prior to the physical realm typically taken for ultimate reality (Mind over Matter). „
• Neoplatonic philosophy is a strict form of principle-monism that strives to understand everything on the basis of a single cause that they considered divine, and indiscriminately referred to as “the First”, “the One”, or “the Good”.
--Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy

12. • „Resolutely Irish, he imaginatively reclaims a land colonized by the British; imposes Irish rhythms, images, genres, and syntax on English-language poetry; and revives native myths, place-names, and consciousness. Yet he is also cosmopolitan, insisting on the transnationalism of the collective storehouse of images he calls ’Spiritus Mundi’ or ’Anima Mundi,’…” Norton, 2020

13. „We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.” –Yeats*
*Norton, 2021

14. „W.B. Yeats’s output of poetry is rich, diverse, variable and paradoxical. Certain themes, locations and attitudes recur throughout them, giving identity to the sequence. But, from the outset, that preoccupation with paradox means that there is plenty of variety and even unpredictability; he can contradict in one poem what he apparently affirms in another.” – Cedric Watts, Wordsworth Poetry Library, x

15. • Theosophical society: the world is a conflict of opposites, the soul undergoes a cycle of reincarnation and each soul is part of a universal soul or great mind (Intro: Wordsworth Poetry Library) vi

19. • „At the center of the symbolic system were the interpenetrating cones, or ’gyres,’ that represented the movement through major cycles of history and across antitheses of human personality…in poems of the 1920’s and 1930’s, winding stairs, spinning tops, „gyres,” spirals of all kinds, are important symbols, serving as a means of resolving some of the contraries that had arrested him from the beginning—paradoxes of time and eternity, change and continuity, spirit and body, life and art.” Norton, 2021

20. • „The end of an age, which always receives the revelation of the character of the next age, is represented by the coming of one gyre to its place of greatest expansion and of the other to that of its greatest contraction.” Yeats

21. • „In one of his last letters he wrote: ’When I try to put all into a phrase I say, ’Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.’…The abstract is not life and everywhere draws out its contradictions. You can refute Hegel but not the Saint or the Song of Sixpence.” Norton, 2022