A Palimpsest of Irishness
Kevin Murphy

W.B. Yeats: A Life
The Apprentice Mage                           
by  R. F. Foster                                          
Oxford                                            
$35.00,  640pages


Writing about Yeats is tricky business these days. During the 1970's and 80's, his 
poetry became a battlefield on which the Irish culture wars, parallel to the political 
violence in the North, were fought. The literary revisionists (as opposed to historical 
revisionists, more about later) attacked, and continue to attack, Yeats's poetry and 
politics on the grounds of his elitism, his idealized (and inaccurate) versions of Irish 
peasantry and Protestant Ascendancy, his occultism, and his late fascination with 
Fascism and eugenics. Critics such as Seamus Deane (Celtic Revivals, 1986; The Field 
Day Anthology of Irish Writing, 1991) and Declan Kiberd (Inventing Ireland, 1995) have 
criticized Yeats's construction of a mystified language of spiritual and racial essence 
which has perpetuated rather than eradicated the cultural colonial status of Ireland. 
Other critics, such as Edna Longley, the late Augustine Martin, and the poet Seamus 
Heaney have argued that the poetry itself either contains adequate refutation of these 
charges or, in Heaney's case, that the poetry transcends the divisive categories of 
class, caste, and hierarchy. l The appearance of the encyclopedic first volume of a new 
Yeats biography by R. F. Foster will, fortunately and unfortunately, provide much 
ammunition for combatants on all sides.

R. F. (Robert Fitzroy, or Roy) Foster is a historian rather than a literary critic (he is 
the Carroll Professor of Irish History at Oxford and the author of Modern Ireland 
1600-1972, 1988), but Irish historians have also had their revisionist and 
anti-revisionist controversies, with Foster placing himself squarely in the camp of the 
revisionists. The historical revisionists, unlike their literary counterparts, follow the 
example of F.S.L. Lyons (Culture and Anarchy in Ireland, 1890- 1939, 1979), and refuse 
to accept at face value the traditional pieties associated with the emergence of the 
Irish nation (a Gaelic and Catholic Irish populace, led by heroic and exemplary 
individuals, triumphantly casting off the yoke of British oppression-what Denis 
Donoghue in Warrenpoint (1990) calls the "Christian Brothers version" of Irish history). 
Instead, theyinterrogate and complicate these pieties, and, in doing so, incur the wrath 
of traditional nationalists, some of whom, as it happens, are also the same literary 
revisionists who have found fault with Yeats.2 For this biography, too, Foster draws on 
the ten years' research that Lyons himself had done for a Yeats biography before his 
death in 1983.

Foster therefore presents himself very much as a historian, rather than as a literary 
critic, and in that light provides the justification for this massive undertaking (The 
Apprentice Mage, the first of the two volumes, runs over 300,000 words). While paying 
praise to earlier literary and critical biographies, particularly those of Richard 
Ellmann (whose "luminous" works, he concedes, "still hold the critical field"), Foster 
declares: 

We are confronting a poetic genius who was also, both serially and simultaneously, a 
playwright, journalist, occultist, apprentice politician, revolutionary, stage-manager, 
diner-out, dedicated friend, confidant and lover of some of the most interesting people 
of his day .

The thematic and psychological approaches taken by Ellmann and others, "dazzling" as 
they may be, cannot adequately address the full range of these "outer" experiences as 
they impact one another, and so Foster proposes to reassemble these many facets of 
Yeats's experience "both chronologically and circumstantially" and thereby "restore the 
sense of a man involved in life, and in history, notably in the history of his country, at 
a time of exceptional flux and achievement." As Foster sums it up: "Most biographical 
studies of WBY are principally about what he wrote; this one is principally about what 
he did."

Foster introduces his biography by noting that Yeats himself also decided to write a 
history of his life, at least the first twenty years of it, as he approached age fifty. 
Reveries, the book Yeats produced, Foster dubs "a disingenuous masterpiece," one 
which, for Foster, says much more about Yeats in 1914 than it does about his life from 
1865 to 1886. To illustrate this point, Foster cites the reaction of George Russell 
(AE), who had known Yeats since his art school days. Russell thought the so-called 
biography contained "the most vacant things man ever wrote." Puzzled at what could 
have prompted Yeats to write the things he did, Russell continued, 

The boy in the book might have become a grocer as well as a poet. Nobody would be 
astonished if this had been issued as a novel, part one, to find in part two the hero had 
for some reason given up thinking of literature and became a merchant.

Foster, it seems, cites this reaction for two reasons. Russell's conclusion about 
Yeats's motive ("The present WBY is the result") points to Yeats's by-then adoption of a 
mask, an artistic persona, and provides Foster with a rationale for referring to Yeats 
throughout the book as "WBY," an acronym which, in its own way, continually (if 
subliminally) reminds the reader that the person, character, and personality of Yeats 
was as much an imaginative construct as any of his poems.

The second reason goes to the heart of Foster's justification for writing yet another 
biography of the poet Yeats, and one with the enormity of detail which this book 
possesses. The Apprentice Mage, as it happens, is also part one of a two-part work, and 
Foster is setting an ambitious task for himself, one which anticipates the second 
volume of this biography. How is it, we may ask ourselves, that the WBY we encounter 
here in the first 49 years of his life could have ever become one of the paramount 
poets in the English language by dint of the poetry he would write in the last quarter 
century of his life?

This question arises because what follows is hardly hagiography. True to his 
revisionist premises, Foster reveals a desanctified (and therefore more humanly 
engaging) WBY. This WBY is only a fair-to-middling student, one who throughout his 
life could never learn French or Irish (or spelling in English), and one who early on 
assumed a pose of arrogance to mask his own sense of social and physical inadequacy. 
This WBY dabbles in hashish and mescal to stimulate occult visions, desperately 
pursues or casually manipulates the women who surround him for their sexual or 
financial support, bullies and soothes the Abbey Theatre actors, and increasingly 
embraces contradictory positions on art and politics, especially the politics of Irish 
nationalism.

On the other hand, as promised, Foster presents us a detailed, layered formation of one 
of the outstanding poets of his time. He draws on Seamus Heaney's analogy of the 
structure of a poem as a trellis across which one trains a vine. Using a two- or 
three-year block of Yeats's life as the structure of each chapter, Foster trains not one, 
but several narratives from different perspectives across the trellis of each short 
time period. The result is a richly textured and deftly interwoven historical chronicle, 
one which distinguishes this study from that of Ellmann's-and Yeats's own-thematic 
approach to the life ("from young Celtic Revivalist to theatrical manager to witness of 
revolution to smiling public man"). Even more, it provides Foster with a scope and a 
comprehensiveness, which allowshim both to render personalities and events in detail 
and to trace over time the strong forces shaping the young poet. The result is what 
Foster calls "a palimpsest of Irishness," one which inscribes Yeats in the thick of his 
times.

The most engaging portraits are the women who surround, obsess, and support the 
young Yeats. There are strong, unattainable women like Maud Gonne whom he meets at 
age twenty-three (there, Yeats says in his Autobiography, "the troubling of my life 
began"). From their meeting in 1889, Yeats idealized this wealthy, self-willed, 
"advanced" (Foster's term) nationalist. Unbeknownst to the then-virginal Yeats, Gonne 
was at the time involved in an affair with Lucien Millevoye, a French journalist and 
radical. Within three months of her meeting with Yeats, she became pregnant with 
Millevoye's child. When the child succumbed to meningitis the next year, she explained 
to Yeats that she had adopted a son who died. Yeats, along with George Russell, 
attempted to assuage her grief with recourse to occult lore, specifically that a child 
could be reincarnated in the same family. Bizarrely enough, this prompted Gonne two 
years later to bring Millevoye to the memorial chapel she had constructed for the 
infant, and there they conceived a second child, Iseult.

Yeats would learn of these doings years later when he once again proposed to Gonne, 
and the revelation was enough to deflect yet again any hope of marriage. Given Gonne's 
"dread of physical love," they were to have a spiritual bond, to be brother and sister of 
the mind. Thus, when Gonne informed him a few years later that she was to marry John 
MacBride, an "advanced" Irish nationalist who had fought against the British in the Boer 
War, Yeats was again devastated.

Equally strong-willed but not at all as inhibited was Florence Farr, the actress with 
whom Yeats had a brief affair shortly after Gonne's marriage. Sexually liberated and an 
advocate of daily sexual intercourse, Farr, for all her admiration for the poet, seemed 
unimpressed by Yeats as a lover. As she said at the end of the affair: "I can do this for 
myself."

At the other end of the spectrum, there were the more compliant women who were 
indeed impressed or overwhelmed by Yeats, and more than willing to offer 
support-financial, sexual, or otherwise-to the by-now more well-known poet. Olivia 
Shakespear (whose daughter Dorothy would marry Ezra Pound) turned from an unhappy 
marriage to become Yeats's first lover. Later Mabel Dickinson, a "stage-struck but well 
connected young woman" who was practicing as a "medical gymnast and masseuse" 
when Yeats met her, would take up the role of "visiting wife" for Yeats. This affair, 
more long-lived, continued intermittently for five years until it ended abruptly with a 
pregnancy scare.

In terms of outright manipulation, Yeats's relation with Annie Horniman, the 
Manchester heiress who provided the financial backing for the Abbey Theatre, seems 
hopelessly ruthless. Horniman was clearly interested in Yeats romantically, but Yeats, 
while maintaining an alluring distance, also kept a close eye on Horniman's 
considerable wealth. At one point, Foster, describing the give-and-take of their 
relations at a sensitive moment in the Abbey's financing, says of Horniman: "The fish 
that WBY had been patiently playing was now brought near the bank." Oliver Gogarty 
(the model for Buck Mulligan in Joyce's Ulysses), who, along with the rest of Dublin, 
was following the lop-sided romance, produced a commemorative limerick:

What a pity it is that Miss Horniman             
When she wants to secure or suborn a man 
Should choose Willie Yeats                          
Who still masturbates                                   
And at any rate isn't a horny man.

Of the women close to Yeats at this point in his life, though, the most significant, and 
perhaps the most complicated, was Lady Augusta Gregory. Thirteen years older than 
Yeats and a widow of several years when they first met, Gregory with Yeats began a 
literary collaboration which would continue for almost forty years. In addition to 
providing Yeats with the material from Irish folklore and ancient epics, she extended 
her estate at Coole to the poet as a literary retreat, provided him with small loans as 
needed, and founded, along with Yeats and John Millington Synge, the Abbey Theatre. 
Her stature as a dramatic collaborator, original playwright, and literary force in the 
Irish Renaissance is currently being reestimated, and Foster's extended portrait of her 
will strengthen it further.3

What is most appealing is the savvy manner in which Lady Gregory deals with the other 
women in Yeats's life. She had little use for Annie Horniman's constant interference 
with the Abbey's business and was decidedly relieved when the Quaker heiress 
withdrew her support from the theatre. While not sexually involved with Yeats, she 
offered him advice on how to woo and win Maud Gonne, even though she had decided 
early on that this was not a woman to be trusted. As she wrote to a friend, "I am afraid 
she is only playing with him, from selfishness and vanity...I don't wish her any harm, 
but God is unjust if she dies a quiet death." Despite this well-placed skepticism, 
Gregory later advised Gonne to marry John MacBride under English law in order to 
protect her own wealth. It was advice, in light of the trauma to follow, that was both 
appropriate and necessary.

But behind and beyond these diverting individual portraits and personalities, Foster 
also wishes to point to life-long influences, ones which would start almost from the 
poet's conception and carry over his entire life. The first and most pervasive of these 
was his father, John Butler Yeats. An unsuccessful painter and a distinctly 
"unVictorian" father, the elder Yeats had to rely on his wife's Pollexfen side of the 
family for support, an embarrassing dependence which he would eventually redirect 
toward his eldest son. John Butler Yeats's real patrimony, however, was his 
sensibility. On the one hand, he had no patience with what passed for traditional 
education at the time and thus encouraged his son's desultory learning; on the other, he 
was a rationalist who chafed at his son's penchant for vagueness and obsessive 
interest in the occult.

Still, he was an artist who read widely and critically, who invariably chose writers as 
his friends, and who transferred a good deal of his own deferred literary ambition to 
his son ("I think your birth," he told him many years later, "was the first great event in 
my life"). In the impoverished London domicile in which the elder Yeats raised his 
family, he continually urged his children to find entertainment in observation and 
imagination. As Foster puts it, "The traditional Yeats imperatives of disciplined, 
imaginative, merciless observation and good conversation were imposed by JBY on the 
household, wherever they were."

One should also note that, aside from the poet himself, John Butler Yeats ("JBY") is the 
only other person in this biography who receives such acronymic distinction. "This is 
not only a matter of convenience," Foster informs us; "They were both, in their ways, 
achieved and astonishing personalities." And thus the acronyms provide a subtle and 
constant reminder throughout the volume that WBY was, for all the fractious 
competition between the two, very much JBY's son.

The second enduring influence on the developing poet was his Irish Protestantism, an 
influence which, in Foster's revisionist view, had more to do with the "ethos" of 
family, class, and money than with doctrinal belief. Speaking of the marriage of JBY to 
Susan Pollexfen, Foster notes:

But it led to the union of two original and distinctive families, which together 
embrace the ethos of midVictorian Protestant Ireland. The Yeatses had their past 
aristocratic associations, Trinity College culture, remnants of landed property and 
well-bred fastidiousness; the Pollexfens seem more reminiscent of the "New England" 
settlers of an earlier period, tough-minded townsmen, impatient with the pretensions 
of the Yeats connection.

In terms of the son, even as Yeats rose to fame as the poet of the new Ireland, Foster 
notes, "he was also a product of the ancien regime: Victorian, Protestant, Ascendancy 
Ireland. And his childhood and youth were punctuated by the events which charted its 
decline." Placing this decline in the context of the political legislation and 
maneuverings of the day, Foster observes: "from the 1860's on, a sense of cultural and 
social marginalization and insecurity haunted the Irish Protestant universe, as the new 
world of self-confident Catholic democracy took over Irish public life."

Interestingly enough, Foster sees this decline of the Ascendancy class as connected to 
what he calls "a particular tradition of Irish Protestant interest in the occult, which 
stretched back through Sheridan Le Fanu and Charles Maturin, took in WBY's 
contemporary Bram Stoker, and carried forward to Elizabeth Bowen." This interest in 
the occult, he suggests, may be seen on one level as "a strategy for coping with 
contemporary threats (Catholicism plays a strong part in all their fantasies), and on 
another as a search for psychic control." The sense of displacement was particularly 
acute for the Yeatses, since the family "had anticipated the decline of a whole 
subculture." 4 Thus, Foster grafts Yeats's subsequent life-long interest in the occult to 
the Ascendancy class in decline from which he sprang.

Despite the fact that Yeats, as a young nationalist, had separated himself politically 
from the staunch antinationalism position of the majority of Irish Protestants, 
especially the conservative Dublin Unionists, an elitist sense of disdain toward the 
emerging Catholic middle class, the core of the "advanced" nationalist movement, 
becomes more evident in his writings and lectures. This is the Yeats, freshly returned 
from a speaking tour in American sporting a chinchilla coat and a newly acquired 
paunch, whom George Moore would famously savage in his memoirs ("And we asked 
ourselves why our Willie Yeats should feel himself called upon to denounce his own 
class; millers and shipowners on one side and on the other a portrait painter of 
distinction").

Still, there were for Yeats deep provocations which pushed him further into an 
isolated, aristocratic stance. Maud Gonne's dramatic separation from MacBride (she 
charged him with seducing her 17-year-old half sister and molesting her daughter 
Iseult, then 11 years old) set Yeats against the advanced nationalists, many of whom 
took MacBride's side. The sensational riots attending the opening of Synge's Playboy of 
the Western World at the Abbey were orchestrated by Sinn Fein, the Catholic 
nationalist organization, and, in Yeats's view, the violence was symptomatic of a 
cultural intolerance endemic to the class. The Catholic middle class resistance to the 
construction of a picture gallery for the painting collection of Hugh Lane, led by 
William T. Murphy-the newspaper mogul who, 20 years earlier, had rallied public 
opinion against the Protestant nationalist Parnell and had more recently opposed the 
Transport Workers strike in Dublin-both indicted and sealed the entire group as 
philistines.

Yeats records his bitterness in "September 1913," a poem which Foster says "stands 
with the great polemics of literature," and one which has generated a good deal of 
controversy. The opening stanza takes deadly aim at a class whose ideals of 
nationalism have been debased by commercial and religious avarice:

What need you, being come to sense,
But fumble in a greasy till 
And add the halfpence to the pence 
And prayer to shivering prayer, until 
You have dried the marrow from the bone?
For men were born to pray and save: 
Romatic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave.


As Foster notes, the phrase, "by the light of a holy candle" which had followed "groping 
in a greasy till" in an initial draft but was omitted in the published text, makes it 
clear that Yeats's "target was Catholic piety as much as commercial vulgarity." The 
poem goes on to valorize the exemplary deeds of three eighteenth-century Irish 
Protestants, whose selfless patriotism would, alas, be misunderstood by modern 
vulgarians as misguided sexual longing.

The fact that Yeats omits the struggles and exploits of the many Catholic nationalists 
in the 18th and l9th century, along with the fact that Yeats had not attended O'Leary's 
funeral in 1907 ("In Irish society, a notable and deliberate gesture," Foster observes), 
has provoked the ire of the literary revisionists. For them, Yeats should be seen, then 
and now, as a snobby poseur who wraps himself in the imaginary chinchilla of the 
Protestant Ascendancy.

Others, in response, have noted that the modern exemplar of nationalism in the poem is 
the Catholic John O'Leary, a person whom Yeats and his father admired for his political 
pluralism, one which respected and encouraged both Catholic and Protestant 
nationalism. Yeats had had a falling out with O'Leary, who had supported MacBride in 
the separation proceedings, which were not finalized until the summer of 1906, and 
thus Yeats's absence from O'Leary's funeral the following year should be seen in light 
of his unwavering support for Maud Gonne.

Even so, it is clear from the letters Yeats had earlier sent to Maud Gonne vigorously 
discouraging her marriage that he was as appalled at her conversion to Catholicism as 
he was at her choice of MacBride. As he wrote in his attempt to dissuade her, "You 
represent a superior class, a class whose people are more independent, have a more 
beautiful life, a more refined life." Should she marry MacBride, she would be "thrust 
down...to a lower order of faith." This class consciousness and cultural elitism, 
presented as the "ethos" of a Protestant superiority in the face of the rising Catholic 
middle class, runs through Responsibilities  (1914), the volume of poems whose 
publication marks the end of this portion of the biography.

In addition, the opening epigraph of that volume, addressed apologetically to his "old 
fathers," his Protestant ancestors on both sides of the family, seems to speak of a 
poet at the end of the productive phase of his career:


Pardon that for a barren passion's sake,
Although I have come close on forty-nine,
I have no child, I have nothing but a book,
Nothing but that to prove your blood and mine.


To paraphrase George Russell's response to the Yeats's autobiography of his childhood, 
the person portrayed here might have as easily turned out to be a burnt-out, 
self-aggrandizing bigot as one of the finest poets of the twentieth century. Who could 
predict that the Yeats we see here at age 49 would subsequently marry and have 
children, become a Senator in the new Irish Free State, and write the astonishing 
poems of his later life? Foster has said that one of the themes which runs through this 
biography is the "delight in what is unforeseen," and surely what could not be foreseen 
by anyone in 1914 is the transformation which both the poet and the country would 
undergo within two years.

The day after Easter, 1916, a small, poorly equipped army of Irish nationalists would 
carry out a short-lived rebellion against British rule. The rebellion would be quickly 
crushed by the British Army, and 15 of its leaders executed by firing squads. While 
most Irish citizens originally opposed the outbreak of violence, the executions of these 
leaders, drawn from the same Catholic middle class Yeats had virulently derided in 
1914, produced dismay and outrage. The snob who had no use for the Catholic 
shopkeepers with their greasy tills two years earlier would reluctantly but memorably 
reach inside himself to acknowledge a fundamental change in his understanding of the 
Ireland he had been a part in shaping. Yeats would see those same "vivid faces" rising 
from their counters and desks change "utterly" from drab, ordinary people into doomed, 
heroic dreamers capable of a bewildering "excess of love" which would cost them their 
lives. Even John MacBride, the "drunken, vainglorious lout" who so embittered this poet 
and who was one of the executed would be named:


I write it out in a verse-
MacDonagh and MacBride 
And Connolly and Pearse 
Now and in time to be, 
Wherever green is worn, 
Are changed, changed utterly: 
A terrible beauty is born.


Every schoolchild in Ireland knows Yeats's "Easter, 1916"; it stands next to the 1916 
Proclamation of Independence as a triumphant and straightforward affirmation of the 
birth of the Irish Free State.

It remains for R. F. Foster, in the complementary volume of this superb biography, to 
situate this literary landmark of the modern Irish Republic in its culturally conflicted 
but utterly human context. But the transformation from "September, 1913" to "Easter, 
1916" is only one of the startling changes to come. If this first volume is an indication 
of what to expect, this Yeats biography, when complete, will also prove an illuminating 
revision of the cultural history of modern Ireland just as it came into being.



1. The debate over Irish revisionism in general can be found in Revising the Rising, ed. 
Mairin Ni Dhonnchadha and Theo Dorgan (Field Day, 1991) and Yeats in particular in 
Yeats's Political Identities, ed. Jonathan Allison (University of Michigan Press, 1996).



2. Foster discusses (and dispatches) the revisionist controversy and its many ironies 
in the introduction to his Paddy and Mr. Punch (1993). See also his essay "We Are All 
Revisionists Now" in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, III (1991), 583-586. For 
a response , see Declan Kierbard, Inventing Ireland (1995), 642 - 646.



3. See, for example, Mary-Lou Kohfeldt's Lady Gregory: The Woman behind the Irish 
Renaissance (1985) and the recent edition of her work, Lady Gregory: Selected 
Writings, ed. by Lucy McDiarmid and Maureen Waters (1995). The renewed interest has 
itself become a site of contestation in the Irish culture wars. Alasdair Macrae, in his 
recent biography of Yeats, complains: "Her proper place in Irish letters has not yet been 
fully charted and in a recent, much-praised but narrowly Republican survey, A Short  
History of Irish Literature (1986) by Seamus Deane, she receives what amounts to a 
token mention," in W. B. Yeats: A Literary Life (1995), 90.



4. See also Foster's essay, "Protestant Magic: W. B. Yeats and the Spell of Irish 
History," in Paddy and Mr. Punch (1993), 212 - 232.