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W. B. Yeats

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The Poet Who Believed in Ghosts

William Butler Yeats once sat in a darkened room, hands joined with strangers around a table, waiting for the dead to speak. This was not some youthful indiscretion he later regretted. It was the animating force of his entire creative life. "The mystical life is the centre of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write," he declared at twenty-seven. He meant it.

That a Nobel Prize winner, one of the most celebrated poets in the English language, spent decades communing with spirits and studying astrology strikes many readers as embarrassing—a great mind's unfortunate hobby, best mentioned briefly and moved past. But you cannot understand Yeats without understanding this: he genuinely believed the veil between worlds was thin, and that poetry could part it.

Born in 1865 in Sandymount, a coastal suburb of Dublin, Yeats came into a world caught between centuries. His father John had trained as a lawyer but abandoned it for portrait painting. His mother Susan came from the Pollexfens, a wealthy Sligo family who made their fortune in milling and shipping. The marriage joined two different Irelands—the artistic Protestant gentry and the hard-nosed merchant class.

A Tongue to the Sea Cliffs

Shortly after William's birth, the family moved to Sligo to stay with the Pollexfens, and something happened there that shaped everything that followed. The landscape claimed him. The mountains, the Atlantic breaking against the cliffs, the mist rolling across Lough Gill—these became what Yeats called his "country of the heart."

His father understood this. "By marriage with a Pollexfen," John Yeats said, "we have given a tongue to the sea cliffs."

That phrase captures something essential about the poet who would emerge. The Yeats side brought artistic ambition and intellectual restlessness. The Pollexfen side brought connection to the Irish earth, to folk tales told by firelight, to a world where fairies were not metaphors but neighbors. William would spend his life trying to make those sea cliffs speak.

The family was artistic through and through. His brother Jack became one of Ireland's finest painters. His sisters Elizabeth and Susan Mary—known as Lollie and Lily to everyone who loved them—threw themselves into the Arts and Crafts movement. Even their cousin Ruth, raised by the Yeats sisters, went on to design the interior of the Australian prime minister's residence. Creativity wasn't a choice in this family. It was the air they breathed.

Between Two Worlds

Yeats belonged to the Protestant Ascendancy, the Anglo-Irish minority that had dominated Ireland for centuries. But he came of age precisely as that dominance crumbled.

Think of what it meant to be twenty years old in 1885. Charles Stewart Parnell was leading the home rule movement, demanding Irish self-governance. Catholic Ireland was rising. The old Protestant order was fighting a rearguard action it would eventually lose. Napoleon once said that to understand any man, you must know what was happening in the world when he was twenty. Yeats's biographer R.F. Foster called this "manifestly true" of the poet.

Here was the tension that would fuel decades of poetry: Yeats loved Ireland with a passion that burned like religion, but the Ireland being born was not entirely his. He was Irish, undeniably, yet his people were the colonizers. He would spend his life working out what that meant.

An Unlikely Student

The young Yeats was not promising material for academic glory. An early school report from Godolphin School in London, where the family had moved to further his father's painting career, damned him with faint praise: "only fair. Perhaps better in Latin than in any other subject. Very poor in spelling."

He may have been dyslexic. He was certainly tone deaf. Mathematics defeated him. Languages frustrated him. Yet he devoured biology and zoology, and something else was stirring—an obsession with stories.

His mother filled his childhood with Irish folktales. His father, erratic as an educator, took him on natural history expeditions through the Slough countryside. Between the myths and the meadows, Yeats was learning to see the world as enchanted, a place where meaning hid behind appearances.

The family bounced between London and Dublin, following John's artistic fortunes. By 1881, they were back in Ireland, and young William enrolled at Erasmus Smith High School. His father's studio was nearby, and the teenager spent hours there, meeting Dublin's artists and writers. Something was crystallizing.

In 1885, the Dublin University Review published his first poems. He was twenty.

Early Verses and Embarrassments

Those first poems were, by Yeats's own later admission, not very Irish at all. A critic named Charles Johnston called them "utterly unIrish," emerging from "a vast murmurous gloom of dreams." The young poet wrote about magicians setting up thrones in Central Asia, about German knights, about bishops and monks and women accused of paganism. He was channeling Percy Bysshe Shelley, Edmund Spenser, the Pre-Raphaelites—anyone, it seemed, except Ireland.

This matters because it shows how deliberately Yeats would later construct himself as an Irish poet. It wasn't automatic. He had to choose it, work at it, invent it.

The turn came through William Blake. Yeats discovered Blake's mystical verses and fell hard. Here was a poet who saw visions, who believed imagination could pierce the veil of ordinary reality. "One of the great artificers of God who uttered great truths to a little clan," Yeats later called him. Blake showed what poetry could be—not decorative, not merely beautiful, but a form of magic.

In 1889, Yeats published his first major collection: The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems. The title poem retold a story from the Fenian Cycle, the ancient Irish tales of the warrior Finn MacCool and his band. The names were obscure, the rhythms hypnotic, the vision unmistakably Irish. Yeats had found his subject.

The Woman Who Changed Everything

In that same year, 1889, a twenty-three-year-old English heiress walked into Yeats's life and detonated it.

Maud Gonne was tall, beautiful, and on fire for Irish independence. She had read "The Island of Statues," one of Yeats's early works, and sought him out. He was a "paint-stained art student," she later claimed—though at twenty-four, he was already publishing poetry. What she saw in him was potential. What he saw in her was everything.

"It seems to me that she brought into my life those days... the middle of the tint, a sound as of a Burmese gong, an over-powering tumult that had yet many pleasant secondary notes."

That sentence, tangled and synesthetic, captures the chaos Gonne introduced. Yeats fell into obsessive love—the kind that reorganizes a life around its object, that makes ordinary existence feel like waiting.

He proposed in 1891. She refused.

He proposed again in 1899. Refused.

Again in 1900. Refused.

Again in 1901. Refused.

"The troubling of my life began," he later wrote of that first rejection. He wasn't exaggerating. For over a decade, Maud Gonne would be the fixed point around which his emotional life orbited—inspiring poem after poem, refusing him again and again.

The Occult Underground

While pursuing Gonne, Yeats was also pursuing something else: direct experience of the supernatural.

In 1885, he helped found the Dublin Hermetic Order, a group dedicated to exploring mystical traditions. That same year, the Dublin Theosophical lodge opened, and Yeats attended lectures by Mohini Chatterjee, a Brahmin scholar who introduced him to Hindu philosophy. The next year, he attended his first séance.

This wasn't dilettantism. In 1890, Yeats was admitted to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a secret society that practiced ritual magic. His magical motto was "Daemon est Deus inversus"—"Devil is God inverted." He recruited members actively, bringing in his uncle George Pollexfen, Maud Gonne herself, and the actress Florence Farr.

The Golden Dawn was no fringe curiosity. Its members included some of the most creative minds in London. The order practiced elaborate rituals based on Kabbalah, Egyptian mythology, and Western esoteric traditions. Members worked their way through grades of initiation, learning systems of correspondences between colors, numbers, planets, and divine names. They believed—and Yeats believed—that these practices could unlock genuine spiritual power.

He was involved in the order's internal power struggles, including the infamous "Battle of Blythe Road" in 1900, when the notorious occultist Aleister Crowley (yes, that Aleister Crowley) was sent to physically repossess Golden Dawn materials during a schism. Yeats sided against Crowley. He would remain connected to Golden Dawn offshoots until 1921.

During séances in 1912, a spirit claiming to be "Leo Africanus"—a sixteenth-century Moorish traveler—announced itself as Yeats's "Daemon" or anti-self. This experience fed directly into his philosophical prose work Per Amica Silentia Lunae, where he developed his theory of masks and opposites.

Building an Irish Theater

Yeats's mysticism never stayed purely private. He believed art could transform consciousness—and transform Ireland.

In 1890, he and Ernest Rhys founded the Rhymers' Club, a group of London poets who gathered in Fleet Street taverns to read their verses aloud. Yeats would later mythologize them as the "Tragic Generation" in his autobiography, romanticizing their struggles and early deaths.

But his real ambition was theater. In 1897, he became chief playwright for the Irish Literary Theatre, and in 1904, with Lady Gregory and John Millington Synge, he founded the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. This would become the national theater of Ireland.

Yeats wanted to create a distinctly Irish drama—plays drawn from mythology and folklore, performed in a style stripped of Victorian melodrama. His own plays included The Land of Heart's Desire (1894), Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902), and Deirdre (1907). They were strange, poetic, ritualistic. Not everyone loved them.

Cathleen ni Houlihan deserves special mention. In it, a mysterious old woman arrives at a peasant cottage and transforms into a beautiful young queen—Ireland herself, calling men to die for her. Maud Gonne played the lead in the first production. The play was inflammatory, nationalist, designed to stir hearts toward revolution.

Years later, after the 1916 Easter Rising had led to executions and then to Irish independence, Yeats would ask himself in a famous poem: "Did that play of mine send out / Certain men the English shot?"

The Wound That Wouldn't Close

In 1903, Maud Gonne married someone else.

His name was John MacBride, an Irish nationalist who had fought against the British in the Boer War. He was a major, a hero to the cause, everything Yeats—with his poetry and his séances—was not. Worse, Gonne converted to Catholicism before the marriage. To the Protestant Yeats, she had betrayed not just him but herself.

The marriage was disastrous. Within a year, Gonne was seeking a divorce, making allegations against MacBride that Yeats supported as her "second" in the legal proceedings. Only one charge held up in a Paris court: MacBride had been drunk once. They separated, with Gonne keeping custody of their son Seán.

Then, in 1908, in Paris, something unexpected happened. After nearly twenty years of rejection, Yeats and Gonne consummated their relationship. One of his other lovers, learning of it later, called it "the long years of fidelity rewarded at last."

Yeats's response was less romantic. "The tragedy of sexual intercourse," he wrote, "is the perpetual virginity of the soul."

The relationship went nowhere. Gonne wrote to him afterward saying they could not continue. The obsession that had powered so much poetry flickered but did not die. She would haunt his verses for decades more.

The Poet Transforms

Around 1900, Yeats's poetry began to change. The dreamy Celtic twilight of his early work gave way to something harder, more physical, more engaged with the actual world.

He never abandoned mysticism—his interest in cycles of history, in masks and anti-selves, in the supernatural dimensions of experience stayed with him always. But the poems grew more concrete. They grappled with politics, with aging, with the violence transforming Ireland.

He championed younger poets, including Ezra Pound, who would push modernist poetry in directions very different from Yeats's own. He kept writing plays, increasingly influenced by Japanese Noh drama, which he found through Pound. These late plays were sparse, symbolic, designed for small audiences rather than theaters.

The volumes kept coming: The Wild Swans at Coole (1919), The Tower (1928), Last Poems and Plays (published posthumously in 1940). Critics who had dismissed his occultism had to acknowledge the power of the work.

In 1923, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. The ceremony citation praised his "inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation."

Senator, Sage, Believer

After Irish independence, Yeats served two terms as a Senator of the Irish Free State. He was in his sixties now, a grand old man of letters, but still contrarian, still difficult.

He opposed the Catholic Church's influence on the new state. He defended divorce rights in a famous Senate speech. He worried that the Ireland being built was too narrow, too pious, too hostile to the Protestant tradition he represented.

And he kept believing in ghosts.

This is what makes Yeats so strange and so fascinating. He was not a mystic who retreated from the world. He was a public figure, a senator, a theater director, a literary celebrity. And he genuinely believed that during séances, spirits spoke through mediums. He believed in astrology, in reincarnation, in elaborate cyclical theories of history that he elaborated in his prose work A Vision.

Some critics, then and now, find this embarrassing. They treat his occultism as a private eccentricity, separable from the "real" poetry. But Yeats insisted otherwise. Without magic, he said, he could not have written his Blake book, could not have created The Countess Cathleen, could not have done any of the work that mattered.

The mystical life was the center. Everything else radiated from it.

The Craft Behind the Vision

What made Yeats's poetry work, even for readers who didn't share his beliefs?

Partly it was craft. He revised obsessively, sometimes publishing multiple versions of the same poem over decades. He developed a style that could shift registers effortlessly—from the incantatory to the conversational, from the mythological to the intimate.

Partly it was honesty. Yeats wrote about his failures, his aging, his political doubts, his unresolved desires. The same man who summoned Celtic gods also wrote with devastating clarity about being old: "What shall I do with this absurdity— / O heart, O troubled heart—this caricature, / Decrepit age that has been tied to me / As to a dog's tail?"

Partly it was the way he used symbols. A swan, a tower, a gyre, a mask—these images recur across his work, accumulating meaning, connecting poems written decades apart into something like a private mythology. You don't have to believe in the Golden Dawn to feel the power of those symbols.

The Country of the Heart

William Butler Yeats died on January 28, 1939, in the south of France. He was seventy-three. The world was sliding toward another war.

His body was eventually returned to Ireland and buried in Drumcliff, County Sligo—the landscape that had claimed him as a child. His epitaph, which he wrote himself, reads: "Cast a cold eye / On life, on death. / Horseman, pass by!"

It's a strange epitaph for a man who spent his life trying to pierce the veil between worlds. But perhaps it makes sense. Yeats believed passionately, pursued obsessively, fought publicly. And in the end, he counseled detachment—as if all that striving had taught him something about letting go.

Or perhaps the epitaph is just another mask. Yeats loved masks. He theorized about them, wrote plays about them, believed that every person has an anti-self, a Daemon, a counterpart in the spirit world who is everything they are not.

The cold-eyed horseman passing by might be the opposite of the young man who sat in darkened rooms, hands joined around tables, waiting for the dead to speak. Both were Yeats. Both were true.

What remains are the poems—still read, still taught, still memorized by people who have never heard of the Golden Dawn. "The Second Coming," with its rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem. "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," with its promise of peace in a place where midnight is "all a glimmer." "Sailing to Byzantium," with its prayer to be gathered into "the artifice of eternity."

These poems work because they touch something deep—the longing for transcendence, the fear of mortality, the hope that meaning hides somewhere behind the surface of things. Yeats believed that meaning was real. He spent his life trying to reach it, through poetry and ritual and love and politics.

Whether the spirits ever answered, only he knew. But the poems answer still.