“W. B. Yeats: A Life” (824 pages. Oxford University Press) is as much an introduction to the fraught history of Irish nationalism as a definitive life of Ireland’s best-loved poet. Indeed, Yeats’s emergence as a writer paralleled the push for Irish nationhood. A member of the Protestant landowning elite who spent many years living in England, Yeats saw the privileges of his class unravel during his childhood. In the first volume of his biography, published six years ago, Foster details Yeats’s struggle to promote an Irish culture that was common to both faiths, interviewing peasants about their pagan beliefs and folk tales.
Foster’s chronological approach may appear pedestrian, but it pays rich rewards. By 1915, Yeats was already considered a mythical figure. Yet Foster’s cool eye for historical accuracy reveals a more complex picture. Yeats’s diplomatic efforts with the British government helped bring about home rule for Ireland in 1920. But he gradually ceased to identify with the staunch republicanism of his lifelong love and fiery muse, Maud Gonne. And as a senator in the new Irish Parliament, he spoke out against legislation advocated by his Catholic peers, including outlawing divorce and the compulsory teaching of Gaelic in schools.
While Foster emphasizes history over literary criticism, he looks well beyond Yeats’s fame as a Nobel Prize-winning statesman. Exploring Yeats’s strange personal mythology, he puts the poet’s obsession with the occult into the context of his quest for a non-Catholic Irish identity. Foster shows how Yeats’s belief in history as a series of repeating cycles nurtured his extraordinary ability to grasp the essence of the moment in his poetry. “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last/Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” he wrote in 1920, capturing the anxiety about the uncertain future of Irish politics. Yeats once described his art to Ezra Pound as “an accident in one’s search for reality.” In this lively new book Foster captures all the richness of that reality, creating a balanced view of Yeats’s poetry and his politics alike.
