Remembering William Butler Yeats:
June 13, 1865–January 28, 1939
Greg Johnson
170 words
William Butler Yeats, the Irish poet, playwright, and politician, was born on this day in 1865. One of the greatest literary figures of the 20th century, Yeats’ life and work straddle the great divide between Romanticism and Modernism. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923.
In life and in art, Yeats rejected modern rationalism, materialism, and egalitarianism. He saw them as coarsening and brutalizing.
Spiritually, Yeats was drawn to mysticism and the occult, influenced in particular by Emanuel Swedenborg and William Blake. Politically, like so many great literary artists of the first half of the 20th century, Yeats was drawn to fascism. To learn more about Yeats’ life, art, and politics, see the following works on this site:
- Kerry Bolton, “W. B. Yeats” (from Artists of the Right)
- Jonathan Bowden, “W. B. Yeats“
- Greg Johnson, “Yeats’ Pagan Second Coming” (Translations: German, Spanish)
- Vic Olvir, “William Butler Yeats: A Poet for the West“
- George Orwell, “W. B. Yeats as Occult Fascist“
Share your favorite Yeats poems below.
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3 comments
“The Fascination of What’s Difficult”
BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
The fascination of what’s difficult
Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent
Spontaneous joy and natural content
Out of my heart. There’s something ails our colt
That must, as if it had not holy blood
Nor on Olympus leaped from cloud to cloud,
Shiver under the lash, strain, sweat and jolt
As though it dragged road metal. My curse on plays
That have to be set up in fifty ways,
On the day’s war with every knave and dolt,
Theatre business, management of men.
I swear before the dawn comes round again
I’ll find the stable and pull out the bolt.
Did not know yeats was a man of the right thanks again counter currents!
“like so many great literary artists of the first half of the 20th century” Yes, I would say that the artist’s concern with order is paramount. I see a grand reactionary wave rising from the Fr. Revolution, so many great writers in the age of Democracy in the final analysis belong more to the right–a fact that the left simply refuses to or is too inconvenient to risk reckoning with: Coleridge, Wordsworth, Schelgels/German Romanticism, Austen, Balzac, Poe, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Hawthorne, G. Eliot, Dostoyevsky, H. James…through Hamsun, Pound, Eliot, Yeats, Lawrence, Conrad, Broch, Powys, Celine, Rilke, Cather, Faulkner, Frost, Waugh, Borges…many more on and on until it’s merciless
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