W.B. Yeats (1865-1939) – The Women and the Poet
Robert Smith, the manager of the Chichester Oxfam bookshop, and expert in antiquarian books and the history of book illustration, gave us an entertaining look at the significant women in W.B Yeats’s life at our September meeting. This was a slight deviation from the advertised, more general title about his social circle, but no one was complaining.
The talk covered Maud Gonne, Lady Augusta Gregory and Madame Blavatsky. Yeats was only 24 when the” troubling of his life began” with his obsession with Maud Gonne, the Irish Revolutionary, activist and actress. She viewed him as a friend but he was romantically inclined and proposed to her 4 times, only to be rejected on every occasion. Her grounds for rejection were that he was not sufficiently enthusiastic about Irish Independence, and he was not Catholic. She was beautiful and imposing and was viewed as Yeats’ muse and as the Irish Joan of Arc. She claimed that he should be thankful for her not marrying him as his unrequited love of her produced his best poetry. He also proposed to her daughter Iseult but was rejected. Maud eventually married Major John McBride, an Irish Nationalist in 1903 , much to Yeats’ dismay. Both Maud and Iseult were arrested for appearing in marches and demonstrations for the Irish Nationalist cause. She was born in Tongham, near Aldershot in 1866. Her father was a captain in the army and was posted to Ireland. It was a time of conflict between Catholics and Protestants with Catholics unable to vote, or own land. Maud was sent away to an uncle in England after her mother’s death but she ran away and joined a touring acting company. In France in 1890, she met Lucien Millevoix, a politician and journalist, with whom she had a son. She appeared in Yeats’ play Cathleen ni Houlihan and wrote a memoir of Queen Victoria, in which she expressed her hatred of the Queen for her suppression of Irish Independence. She and Sean McBride, her son, were a power couple in the Nationalist cause. Major John McBride was eventually executed for his part in the Easter Rising of1916. Gonne was also antisemitic and pro-Nazi and a founding member of Sinn Fein. She did not identify as a feminist but advocated for women’s involvement in political matters. Yeats’ famous poem ‘Another Troy ‘was inspired by his passion for Maud Gonne.
Lady Augusta Gegory was more than a mother or father or friend to Yeats. She was the “only person in the world to whom I could tell everything”. She was born in 1852 in County Galway and was mainly interested in Irish Folk Tales. She was married at 28 to a much older man of 63. In the first year of her marriage she had an affair with the poet William Blunt. She had a passion for a return to Celtic traditions. Her son Robert was killed in the Great War (RAF) and Yeats wrote the poem “ An Irish Airman Forsees His Death” as a tribute to him. Her house at Coole became a literary haven and has a tree signed by some literary greats of the time. She met Yeats in 1897 and is believed to be responsible in part for Yeats’ most successful play Cathleen ni Houlihan. They had a successful and close mentor -like relationship. She was also involved in “Our Irish Theatre’ project which struggled for lack of funds. It was later re-established as the Irish National Theatre and in 1904 moved to the Abbey Theatre, where it was free from British Censorship. There were over 600 performances of Gregory’s plays and some still appear on University curriculum. Her notes in the marginalia of Yeats’ Cathleen ni Houlihan account for the debate on how much of the play was actually written by him and how much could be attributed to Gregory. She was a prolific and successful playwright.
Madame Blavatsky (1831-1891) according to Yeats “has become the most famous woman in the whole world by sitting in her armchair and getting people to talk to her”. She was born of Russian parents, travelled extensively and was a beguiling, if unreliable, storyteller. She was married at 17. She was interested in the spirit world, clairvoyance and astral projects. She moved to the USA in 1873 and founded the Theosophical Society. She wrote a work “Isis Unveiled” which was printed with only 1000 copies and is now very rare and valuable. Yeat’s worked for 20 years writing “A Vision” (1925) a complex work, in which he connected the occult to his poetic craft. Yeats was also very interested in the occult and the opposing forces of the spinning gyres. He believed one had 28 re-incarnations during a lifetime. He joined the Theosophical Society aged 22 and was expelled in 1890. Lady Gregory was very sensitive to criticism and was widely discredited for her contradictory stories and was viewed by some as a con artist. Yeats was a member of the Hermetic Order of The Golden Dawn, also associated with Aleister Crowley. Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming” reflects his interest in the turning of the gyres and the pull of opposing forces with the famous line “the centre cannot hold.”
Our thanks to Robert Smith for showing us, with style and fluency, how these three colourful , strong women influenced Yeats and prompted some of his most famous poems.
Lois Coulthart