W.B. Yeats and Lissadell
William Butler Yeats was a Sligo boy who, with his brother Jack Yeats, evoked the Sligo countryside with great beauty and genius in poetry and painting. When Robert Gore-Booth built the new house at Lissadell in the 1830s, Yeats’ great grandfather, John Butler-Yeats, was Rector of nearby Drumcliff (1811 to 1846). As children the boys visited Lissadell for cricket matches and horse racing; and as a young man the poet made friends with the Gore-Booth sisters Constance and Eva, and often stayed at Lissadell during the years 1892-3, when he was visiting his uncle, George Pollexfen at Thornhill in Sligo, and again in the following years.
Yeats found “a very pleasant, kindly, inflammable family, ever ready to take up new ideas and new things”, and “an exceedingly impressive house .. with a great sitting room as high as a church and all things in good taste. Outside it is grey, square and bare yet set amid delightful grounds”.
Born on 13 June 1865, Willie was the first child of artist (and barrister) John Yeats. He had an excellent relationship with his father (a hands-on dad, unusual for the time) who later confided to him that: “your birth was the first great event in my life..I was for the first time — I suppose — pure animal. I never felt like that afterwards, at the birth of the others.”
John Yeats sketched his son as an infant, and later as a young boy, and these sketches are in the Lissadell Collection. Father + son maintained a lifelong loving and amusing correspondence .
William Blake: Poetic, Symbolic and Critical
In 1885 the Dublin University Review published Yeats’ first works, including poetry and essays. They include poetry, plays and an essay called “The Poetry of Sir Samuel Ferguson“. Yeats’ teenage poetry was derived from the English Romantic poets, mainly Shelley, and from the English Renaissance poet Spenser. Yeats later turned to the great English poet William Blake, and was working on a monumental 3 volume edition of the poetry of Blake in 1892 -3, when he made friends with the Gore-Booth sisters, Eva and Constance.
Eva Selina Gore-Booth was also a poet, and asked Yeats for his help. He advised her that ‘whenever the feeling is weightiest you are at your best’, and recommended that she read Blake. Eva’s three volume copy of Yeats on Blake is now on display in the Yeats Exhibition, with Eva’s original bookplate, a beautiful piece of work in itself.
In 1923 Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature “for his always inspired poetry which, in a highly artistic form, gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation”.
In his acceptance speech he said:
“I have chosen as my theme the Irish Dramatic Movement. From the very start we felt that we must have a theatre of our own .. we wanted Irish plays and Irish players. It was not until I met in 1896 Lady Gregory that a theatre became possible. All about her lived a peasantry who told stories in a form of English which has much of its syntax from Gaelic, much of its vocabulary from Tudor English .. we discovered in that speech of theirs our most powerful dramatic instrument. Two events brought us victory, a friend gave us a theatre (now the Abbey), and we found a strange man of genius, John Synge. Picturesque, poetical, fantastical, a masterpiece of style and of music, the supreme work of our dialect theatre, it roused the populace to fury. Synge’s work, the work of Lady Gregory, my own Cathleen ni Houlihan, and my Hour glass in its prose form, are characteristic of our first ambition. They bring the imagination and speech of the country, all that poetical tradition descended from the middle ages, to the people“.
