Why is yeats pronounced yates

But political societies and the press turned against his aesthetic purposes. The poems in The Wind among the Reeds were termed "affected," "un-Irish," "esoteric," "pagan," and "heretical. He soon began to clear his style of its symbolic trappings, to make it austere, flexible, resonant—an instrument of great lyric and dramatic range.

Had he clung to the early style, with its long swing, almost like incantation, its heavy imagery, he would have limited himself unduly. Coming when they did, however, these evocations of Celtic beauty, heroism, and strangeness wakened, as more severe music could not then waken, Ireland's ears to the sound of its own voice speaking its own music. Yeats had the good fortune to form, in the late '90s, one of the most important friendships of his life. He met Lady Gregory when his need for a staying influence was crucial.

He had not entirely escaped the results of the romantic violence let loose more into their personal lives than into their poetry by the poets of the decade, in their revolt against respectable bourgeois strictures.

He has indicated the nature of his own crisis in Dramatis Personae. I must have spent the summer of at Coole. I was involved in a miserable love-affair. Romantic doctrine had reached its extreme development. My nerves had been wrecked. Lady Gregory, whom Yeats met through Arthur Symons and Edward Martyn Martyn's demesne, Tillyra, adjoined Coole , was a woman of much cultivation and generosity of spirit.

Yeats had lost the power to impose upon himself regular habits of work. Lady Gregory, who was later to write out the Irish legends in the simple speech of the peasants of her countryside, took him from cottage to cottage collecting folklore. Coole and its environs were to give the mature Yeats a background for his later work, as Sligo had given him a scene for his earlier.

With his technical apprenticeship and his most excessive enthusiasms behind him, Yeats turned away from the middle-class culture of Dublin to the people of Galway farms and villages, "Folk is our refuge from vulgarity. Yeats knew that nothing was read in Ireland but "prayer books, newspapers, and popular novels. They were a potential audience, in the primary sense of that word.

He had already formed in Dublin the National Literary Society, with the intention of giving "opportunity to a new generation of critics and writers to denounce the propagandist verse and prose that had gone by the name of Irish literature. He had written plays, but had no stage, unless it were the stage of small halls, where they could be presented.

Against him were ranged the entrenched powers of the commercial theatre, the Church, and the press, the last two informed with the special Irish fear of "humiliation" and misinterpretation, bred from Ireland's peculiar political situation. His own plays caused mild trouble. Synge's Playboy , presented in , brought on a week of riots and emptied the Abbey Theatre for months. But Yeats held out, against an enraged Dublin and an intimidated company.

By the public had learned how to listen to imaginative drama with appreciation, to satiric plays without resentment. The Irish Dramatic Movement had come through, at the cost of great energy and courage expended by its founders. Yeats then turned away from the "popular" theatre, and began to write plays which could be presented in a room by a few amateurs and musicians, plays which could carry his special music and dramatic formality with the least theatrical machinery.

If we grant naturalness, sincerity, and vigor to Yeats's late style, we still have not approached its secret. Technical simplicity may produce, instead of effects of tension and power, effects of bleakness and poorness. What impresses us most strongly in Yeats's late work is that here a whole personality is involved.

A complex temperament capable of anger and harshness, us well as of tenderness , and a powerful intellect, come through; and every part of the nature is released, developed, and rounded in the later books. The early Yeats was, in many ways, a youth of his time: a romantic exile seeking, away from reality, the landscape of his dreams.

By degrees—for the development took place over a long period of years—this partial personality was absorbed into a man whose power to act in the real world and endure the results of action responsibility the romantic hesitates to assume was immense.

Yeats advanced into the world he once shunned, but in dealing with it he did not yield to its standards.

That difficult balance, almost impossible to strike, between the artist's austerity and "the reveries of the common heart,"—between the proud passions, the proud intellect, and consuming action,—Yeats finally attained and held to.

It is this balance which gives the poems written from roughly on from Responsibilities , published in that year, to poems published at present their noble resonance. Technically, the later style is almost lacking in adverbs—built on the noun, verb, and adjective. Its structure is kept clear and level, so that emotionally weighted words, when they appear, stand out with poignant emphasis.

The Wild Swans at Coole opens:—. Equipped with this instrument, Yeats could put down, with full scorn, his irritation with the middle-class ideals he had hated from youth:—. On the other hand he could celebrate Irish salus, virtus , as in the poem "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death," and in the fine elegies on the leaders of the Easter Rebellion. When he was a young man, Ireland was a part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland but there had been a growing movement for independence through the nineteenth century.

At the same time he was developing his interest in the supernatural and occultism, first through the Theosophical Society and later through the Golden Dawn. A recurrent symbol is that of the Rose, in which Ireland, Maud and vision meet along with other elements. For him symbols were more than a poetic tool, tapping into a vast reservoir of collective experience, which he termed at various stages the Great Memory, Anima Mundi the World Soul , and the Record, none of which is, however, quite the same as the other.

Among the many factors involved, three stand out: his friendship with Ezra Pound, his marriage to Georgie Hyde Lees, and the advent of the ideas of A Vision. Through Pound he was brought into contact with what became known as modernism, as well as Oriental art and thought. Over five or six years the Yeatses engaged in frequent sessions, where WBY would ask questions and, while Georgie was in a trance-like state, her hand would write answers see below. These answers were attributed to a variety of controlling spirits and, as the script built up, it outlined a complex, esoteric system of thought, centred on cycles of change, which WBY spent years turning into a formal exposition, A Vision.

Although he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in , the two collections of poetry which are generally regarded as his finest single volumes, The Tower and The Winding Stair , appeared in and respectively. According to her recollection they first met in May and he sponsored her joining of the Golden Dawn in ; they talked of marriage in late , in such a way that Georgie regarded it as an engagement, while WBY apparently did not, since he later proposed again to Maud Gonne and then her daughter, Iseult.

He proposed properly to Georgie on 26 September and they were married shortly after her twenty-fifth birthday on 20 October She was almost thirty years his junior and the marriage started inauspiciously, particularly since WBY was racked by doubts that he should have married Iseult Gonne.

She suggested that they attempt some automatic writing, which was in fact far from automatic, as she obliquely but very deliberately wrote that WBY had made the right decision. The birth of their children, Anne in and Michael in , gradually helped to reduce the commitment of time, and the system began to reach a form of completion.

A Vision On the afternoon of October 24th , four days after my marriage, my wife surprised me by attempting automatic writing. What came in disjointed sentences, in almost illegible writing, was so exciting, sometimes so profound, that I persuaded her to give an hour or two day after day to the unknown writer, and after some half-dozen such hours offered to spend what remained of life explaining and piecing together those scattered sentences.

Yeats started work on the first exposition of the system within a month of the start of the Automatic Writing in and continued working on it until Over ten years were therefore dedicated to this work, although the Communicators had said that the purpose of the Script was to give him metaphors for poetry.

Whatever the commitment to working on the System, however, it does not seem to have impeded his poetic and dramatic production. I do not know what my book will be to others — nothing perhaps. This was to be part of a new Edition de Luxe, published by Macmillans, which never came to fruition, and the revised version was finally published independently in in the US. The revisions are significant and the major differences are outlined on The Two Editions.

One preliminary point must be made: the System of A Vision presupposes reincarnation. Contents A Vision B is divided into two introductions and five sections, with two poems. These stories centre around Michael Robartes , the supposed discoverer of the System, and a group of young people who become his followers.

In it, Robartes outlines to Aherne the twenty-eight incarnations represented by the phases of the Moon. It gives some general observations about the cycle entailed, and a series of rules concerning the Faculties , their True and False forms , and a set of tables showing the disposition of the Faculties in each incarnation, as well as certain characteristics and categories, including those of the Four Quarters of the Wheel.

Irish Women's Suffrage Federation August Irish Newspaper Archive. He received the Noble Prize for Literature in Alternative Title s : WB Yeats. Show Spoilers. How well does it match the trope?