William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) - Life (1)

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1865-86: b. 10.40 p.m., 13 June 1865, 1 George’s Ville [a semi-detached house, later 5, Sandymount Ave.], Dublin; son of John Butler Yeats [JBY], a lawyer turned painter and Susan Mary Yeats [née Pollexfen, of Merville Hse., Sligo; d. 3 Jan. 1900], and gs. of ‘Parson John’ rector of Co. Down and Drumcliff, Sligo [var Drumcliffe], in lineal descent from Jervis Yeats, a Williamite soldier who succeeded as a linen merchant and whose gs. Benjamin married a Mary Butler, bringing 560 acres in Co. Kildare into the family [see infra]; passed early childhood in Sligo (‘I have walked upon Sindbad’s yellow shore and never shall another’s hit my fancy’; Autobiog.), and much-influenced by stories of Merville servants incl. Mary Battle, a house-maid of his uncle’s; bapt. at St. Mary’s Church, Simmonscourt, Donnybrook, 12 July, 1865 [record extant]; family moves to London, 1867-72 in pursuit of his father’s ambition to become a portrait painter, living first at 23 Fitzroy Rd., nr. Regent’s Park, then 14 Edith Villas, West Kensington, in 1874, and after 8 Woodstock Rd. [Bedford Park], No. 3 Blenheim Rd., Bedford Park, in 1876 - being neighbours of Elkin Mathews at No. 3 Blenheim Rd. [Bedford Park, W4]; returns to Merville, 1872-74, travelling on the Sligo or the Liverpool, ships of the Pollexfen line; still unable to read at seven; back in London, 1874-81, ed. at Godolphin Sch., Iffley, Rd., Hammersmith, 1877-81; regarded as ‘hopless’ by headmaster, until introduction of science to the curriculum, after which he ‘topped’ the older boys though only 14 (acc. his father, JBY); with his father saw Irving play Hamlet and affected the actor’s way of walking, 1879; family holiday in Devon, 1879; family returns to Dublin on exhausion of father’s income from Kildare property, living at Balscadden Cottage, Howth, 1880, then Island View, Howth [overlooking Howth Harbour], 1881, and afterwards to villa in Rathgar [‘a time of crowding & indignity’]; WBY spends holidays with Pollixfens in Sligo; attends Erasmus Smith High School, Harcourt St., Dublin, Oct. 1881-Dec. 1883, under headship of William Wilkins; enamoured of Laura Armstrong, a cousin who acts in his ‘Vivien and Time’, plays in the home of Judge Wright in Howth, betweeen 1882 and 1884 (when she married); attends Metropolitan College of Art, May 1884-July 1885 [vars. 1883- and -1886]; meets “AE” [George Russell], John Hughes and Oliver Sheppard, inter al.; writes “Love and Death”, a drawing-room play concerning Ginevra who espouses heinous crime to be near the god she has seen in her childhood garden, April 1884 [written when he was ‘taking small interest in people but most ardently moved by the more minute kinds of natural beauty’ (“Reveries [&c.]”, in Autobiographies); shown A. P. Sinnett’s Esoteric Buddhism (1884) by Charles Johnston [var. copy sent to WBY by his aunt Alice Pollexfen; and see under Johnston, supra]; family moves to 10 Ashfield Tce., nr. Harold’s Cross, 1884; writes “Island of Statues” (Aug. 1884); contribs. two short lyrics to Dublin University Review (March 1885); forms Dublin Hermetic Society in York St. with Johnston, Claude Wright, and Charles Weekes, et al., 16 June, 1885, WBY chairing [presiding over] the first meeting [later meeting at 3 Upr. Ely Place, and later still at 13 Eustace St.] - an event noticed in Dublin University Review (1 July 1885); writes reviews and essay in various magazines, 1885-86; joins Contemporary Club, fnd. by Charles Hubert Oldham in 1885; meets Douglas Hyde, Katharine Tynan and John O’Leary, 1885; reads Standish James O’Grady, James Clarence Mangan, and Samuel Ferguson; commences The Shadowy Waters (1900), 1885, to be started over in 1894; attends his first séance; arrival of Brahmin Mohini Chatterjee to help fnd. Dublin Theosophical Lodge, 1885-early 1886 (‘We ourselves are nothing but a mirror […] deliverance consists in turning the mirror away so it reflects nothing’); publishes “The Seeker” (Dublin University Review, 1 Sept. 1885, pp.120-23); moves to Royal Hibernian Academy School, early 1886; publishes Mosada: A Dramatic Poem (1886), a pamphlet ‘play’ written for Laura Armstrong in 1885, in which a Moorish enchantress is burned on the unwitting orders of her childhood sweetheart; publishes “The Poetry of Sir Samuel Ferguson”, essay, in Irish Fireside (9 Oct. 1886), to be reprinted in Dublin University Review (Nov. 1886), inaugurating his attacks on Dowden; “The Stolen Child” appears in Irish Monthly (Dec. 1886);

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1887-91: writes The Wanderings of Oisin, originally as Usheen, between 1886 and 1888, and completed in its earliest version in Nov. 1887 - based on Michael Comyn’s poem “The Lay of Oisin in the Land of Youth” in O’Looney’s translation for the Transactions of the Ossianic Society (1854-63), with further influence from Tennyson’s “Voyage of Maeldune”, &c.; completes “Dhoya”, a ‘fantastic tale of the heroic age’ concerning the lonely giant early and his fairy-lover, Sept. 1887 (Letters, I, 1986, p.36.); returns to London with his parents, living at 58 Eardley Crescent, Earls Court, 1887; his mother suffers first of her strokes, 1887; first meeting with MacGregor Mathers (bapt. Samuel Liddle Mathers), who he used as a model for ‘Michael Robartes’, 1887; W. B. visits Morris at Kelmscott House; joins Esoteric Section of Theosophical Society ( London Lodge), Oct. 1889 - ‘about Xmas 1888’ by his own account, making oath of obedience and belief to Mme [Helena Petrovna] Blavatsky in spite of [her] criticisms of the Psychical Research in 1884; moves with family to 3 Blenheim Rd., also nr. Bedford Pk., 1888; JBY’s property in Ireland sold under the Ashbourne Act, 1888; WBY first attends the Southwark Irish Literary Club, March 1888; commences publishing in the Providence Journal and Boston Pilot through O’Leary’s Fenian connections [‘Your Celt has written the greater bulk of his letters from the capital of the enemy’]; meets Oscar Wilde at home of W[illiam] E[rnest] Henley - a friend and neighbour at Bedford Park and ed. of Scots Observer, Sept. 1888; invited to visit Wilde’s home at Tite St. on Christmas Day, when Wilde reads from the MS of “The Decay of Lying” after a turkey dinner; informed by Wilde that literary gossip was not a job for a gentleman; meets John Todhunter, York Powell, John Nettleship and Edwin J. Ellis [the “brotherhood”]; does copying work in British Museum and Bodleian libraries for David Nutt; lectures on “Sligo Fairies”; with T. W. Rolleston, Douglas Hyde, Katharine Tynan, John Todhunter, George Sigerson, et. al., produces Poems and Ballads of Young Ireland (1888), under guidance of John O’Leary; ed., Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (Walter Scott 1888), for Ernest Rhys’ Camelot series, incorporating materials from Croker, Carleton, Lover, Kennedy, O’Kearney, McClintock, Hyde, the Halls, with var. others such as W. S. Mason (Statistical Account of the Parochial Survey of Ireland, ... 1814-19) and even Giraldus Cambrensis - avoiding belittlements of Irish character and describing Ireland as hitherto ‘a humorist’s Arcadia’; issued Stories from Carleton (Scott 1889) - the latter to help Ernest Rhys, who was series editor; publishes The Wanderings of Oisin (Jan. 1889), with help of subscriptions raised by John O’Leary, only to meet with disappointing sales; forms Rhymers’ Club with Lionel Johnson, Ernest Rhys, and others incl. John Davidison and the ‘Trinity men’ Rolleston and Todhunter, et al., generally meeting at the Cheshire Cheese (viz., Second Book of the Rhymers’ Club, 1894); meets Maud Gonne, 30 Jan. 1889 (‘the troubling of my life began’), sent to the WBY’s home in London by John O’Leary; initiated into Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (Isis-Urania Temple), at 17 Fitzroy St., London, 7 March 1890, adopting the occult name of “DEDI” [i.e., “Demon est Deus Inversus”]; secures Maud Gonne’s membership and initiation also; writes doggerel verses for Tract Society cards; composes “Lake Island of Inisfree” about an island on Lough Gill (actually called Iniscrewin), London 1890, under circumstances narrated in the novella John Sherman - a kind of anti-Bildungsroman, in which ‘the motif of which is hatred of London’ (Memoirs, ed. Donoghue, 1972, p.31., n.4); collaborates with Edwin J. Ellis during 1889-1893 on edition of The Poems of William Blake, 3 vols. (1893), working at Ellis’s home, 40 Milson Rd., Kensington; sees Florence Emery Farr (d.1917) at Bedford Park Playhouse, London; gives paper to Theosophical Society on “Theosophy and Modern Culture”, Aug. 1890; asked to resign from esoteric section of the Theosophical Society by Madame Blavatsky’s secretary, Nov. 1890; studies Kabbala, Swedenborg, and Boehme; proposes marriage to Maud, only to be refused, at Howth, Aug. 1891; attends inaugural meeting of Young Ireland League, intended to unite Irish literary societies, with John O’Leary, Sept. 1891; edits an anthology of Irish novelists as Representative Irish Tales [Unwin’s Pseudonym Library, No. 10] (March 1891); publishes John Sherman and Dhoya (both 1891), as pseud. “Ganconagh” [meaning ‘love-talker’ - as explained in ‘Irish Fairies, Ghosts, Witches, &c.’, in Lucifer, 15 Jan. 1889];

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1892-94: staying at 3 Ely Place with Hermetic Group of Theosophists formed around George Russell, with D. N. Dunlop, Ferderick Dick and the illustrator Althea Gyles (discovered by Dick); fnd. Irish Literary Society in London, Dec. 1891-Jan. 1892, superseding Southwark Literary Society, with T. W. Rolleston as Secretary, Charles Gavan Duffy as President, and Stopford Brooke as Vice-President; horrifies older membership by criticising poetry of Davis in public; proposes publishing series of books to begin with a biography of Tone by Rolleston, and a consecutive history of Ireland in ballads, edited by WBY, with a life of Sarsfield by Lady Wilde, and a work on Irish education by Lionel Johnson, July 1892 (Wade, ed., Letters, p.212); ‘amgalmates’ with the Irish National Library, a similar enterprise suggested by Charles Gavan Duffy; appeals to Richard Garnett, then reader for Unwin, over differences with Duffy (and later wrote of Duffy, ’no argument of mine was intelligible ot him’); sends letter forecasting ruin of the project to Freeman’s Journal (6 Sept. 1892); invited by Henley to contribute fiction in the vein of “Dhoya” to National Observer, resulting in publication of eight stories, 1892-94; proposes again to Maud Gonne, who returns to France; meets her arriving in Dublin in same ship as Parnell’s coffin - but did not himself attend the funeral; writes a poem on Parnell (“Mourn and Then Onward” - not republished by Yeats himself); publishes fiction in The New Review, The Sketch, The Savoy, The Pageant, The Speaker, and The Weekly Sun, 1892-1896; Elkin Mathew publishes of Book of the Rhymers’ Club (1892); fnd. National Literary Society in Dublin, with John T. O’Kelly (who announced the plans in the United Irishman), John O’Leary and others, modelled on Young Ireland League, with inaugural meeting at the Rotunda, 24 May 1892; publishes The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics (1892), the former a verse play (orig. written as “Countess Kathleen O’Connor” - un ange de beauté) intended to convince Maud Gonne that he could write for a general audience; ed. Irish Fairy Tales (1892); est. library service of Irish National Literary Society, June [var. Sept.] 1892, Maud Gonne travelling to establish branches; “Fergus and the Druid” printed in National Observer, May 1892; writes a letter to United Ireland (14 May 1892) rebuking Irish public for not buying books; admitted to Second Order of the Golden Dawn, 1892; contests ‘necessity for de-anglicising Ireland’ by use of Irish language of the new literature as proposed by Hyde, in letter to United Ireland (17 Dec. 1892); advances to grade of Portal and Zelator Adeptus Minor in Hermetic Soc., resp. 20 Jan. 1893 and 28 June 1893; with Edwin Ellis, publishes an edition of Blake (2 vols., 1893); edits The Celtic Twilight (1893), a collection of tales and sketches about of leprechauns, tramps and ghostly visitations; lectures on “Nationality and Literature” to the National Literary Society, 19 May 1893, comparing the evolution of national literature to that of a tree, epic, ballad, and lyric corresponding to stages of national life; visits Belfast and lectures to Belfast Naturalists’ Field Club on ‘the consoling faith’ of “Irish Fairy Lore”, 21 Nov. 1893; visits Paris, accompanied by Maud Gonne, Feb. 1894; stays with MacGregor Mathers, and proposes to Gonne again; meets Verlaine and attends performance of Villiers de l’Isle Adams’s Axël, with Gonne, Paris, 26 Feb., 1894 (‘Vivre? les serviteurs feront cela pour nous’) - and adopted it as ‘one of his sacred books’; contrib. to Second Book of the Rhymers’ Club (1894); meets Mrs. Olivia Shakespear [née Olive Tucker], a cousin of Lionel Johnson; his play, The Land of Heart’s Desire, produced in at Avenue Theatre, London, 29 March & 14 April 1894 [var. running six weeks], under management of Florence Farr who appeared in it with Dorothy Paget; playbill by Beardsley; viewed by Oscar Wilde and George Moore; stays in Sligo with his cousin George Pollexfen and revises Countless Kathleen there while experimenting with symbols, Nov. 1894-May 1895; visits Gore-Booths at Lissadell, 1894, and enjoys himself ‘telling stories - old Irish stories’ to the girls;

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1895-96: writes letter to Dublin Daily Express [var. Telegraph] (27 Feb. 1895), listing 100 ‘best Irish books’ on the lines of a previous list that appeared in The Freeman’s Journal in 1885 (pamph. 1886); answered by D. F. Hannigan with an alternative list excluding Standish James O’Grady; rejects ‘Irishness’ of Ussher, Berkeley, Swift, and Sterne in letter during exchanges with Dowden in Dublin Daily Express (8 March 1895); contributes further list of ‘The Thirty Best Irish Books’ to United Ireland (16 March, 1895); substantially revised Wanderings of Oisin as “The Wanderings of Usheen”, for Poems (1895); issues collected, expanded, and revised Poems (1895); passes Pt. I of Z.A.M. examination, June 1895; contribs. four articles on Irish literature monthly to The Bookman (July-Oct. 1895), the last including a list of 40 Irish titles; issues A Book of Irish Verse (March 1895), with an introduction criticising both the sentimental patriotism advanced by C. G. Duffy and the hostility to Irish culture epitomised by TCD; worsening relations with Dowden and Mahaffy; shares rooms with Arthur Symons at Fountain Court, Temple, London, 1895-96; issues the essay “The Moods” (1895), professing that all strong emotions were actually eternal messengers or gods (Essays and Introductions, p.195); attends New Lyric Club Dinner, 22 Jan. 1896; moves to 18 Woburn Buildings (later 15 Woburn Walk), 1896; starts an affair with Olivia Shakespear (herself involved in a loveless marriage with Henry Hope Shakespear, a solicitor, with whom a dg. Dorothy [Shakespear], later to marry Ezra Pound, conceived at the time of marriage after which intercourse ceased), 1896-97, and first experience of complete sexual union; WBY initially impotent out of excitement but later enjoyed ‘many days of happiness’; visits Paris and sees premier of Jarry’s Ubi Roi (10 Dec. 1896), responding with an apocalyptic perception about the sequel to the Symboliste movement: ‘What more is possible? After us the Savage God’ (Autobiogs., p.349); meets Synge, and tours West of Ireland with Symons, staying at Edward Martyn’s house, Tulira [var. Tullyra] Castle where a ‘vision of Diana’ comes to provide ‘the chief source of [his] inspiration’ (Autobiog. p.371); meets Lady Gregory there and receives his first invitation to Coole Park, in south Co. Galway, during period of debility in aftermath of his affair with Olivia Shakespear; visits Aran Islands on two fishing trips, being much impressed by folk and fairy tales narrated to him; plots a novel to be set on Aran and in Paris; involved with Maud Gonne in 1798 Commemoration Commitee-work and elected President of Commemorative Association of Great Britain and France, 1897; rides ‘in a wagonette’ with Maud Gonne to public meetings; opening event in Dublin on sixtieth anniversary of Queen Victoria’s accession marked by serious riots, 22 June 1897; prob. joined Irish Republican Brotherhood [IRB], 1895-96; re-encounters Lady Gregory in London, 1896; becomes involved with George Russell, Maud Gonne, McGregor Mathers and others, in establishing an Order of Celtic Mysteries to be centred on a ‘Castle of Heroes’ on Lough Key, Co. Roscommon, 1896-1902; travels to Paris to found the Order, and there meets Synge, Dec. 1896; collects folklore with Lady Gregory on Aran, in the Burren, in Sligo and in Doneraile, Co. Cork, as well as at Coole, 1896-mid 1898; takes hasheesh [‘haschish’] with Symons and others, Dec. 1986; three poems by Yeats included in Lyra Celtica:An Anthology of Representative Celtic Poetry, ed. Elizabeth Sharp (Edin.: Patrick Geddes & Colleagues 1896) - “;Modern and Contemporary Scotto-Gaelic Poetry” section.

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1897-99: experiments with mescal, provided by Havelock Ellis, April 1897; first visit to Coole Park (‘my home for nearly forty years’; Wade, ed., Letters, p.799), where he collects folklore with Lady Gregory, 1897; there attempts to complete The Speckled Bird, his novel contracted at rate of £2 p.w. in advance from Lawrence & A. H. Bullen (first draft 1896); works on it intermittently, 1897-1902 - the main chars. being based on WBY’s father, Maud Gonne, MacGregor Mathers and Olivia Shakespear; abandons it at 150,000 words; accepts money from Lady Gregory to free him from journalism having written over 200 pieces for The Bookman and the Boston Pilot, et al.; plans the Irish Literary Theatre - originally styled ‘The Celtic Theatre’- with Lady Gregory and Edward Martyn, first at Duras, the home and garden of the old Count Florimond de Basterot, and later at Coole Park, Oct. 1897; issues The Secret Rose (1897), a collection of esoteric tales previously printed in journals, ded. to “AE” [Æ; George Russell] and dealing with ‘... the war of the spiritual with the natural order’, incorporating stories of Red Hanrahan, and ending with “Rosa Alchemica” [publ. The Savoy, ed. Arthur Symons, 2nd iss., 1896] - but omitting “The Tables of the Law” [publ. The Savoy, Nov. 1896, being the penult. iss.] and “The Adoration of the Magi” - orig. planned as concluding stories - on account of Bullen’s failure of nerve (‘[he] took a distaste to them and asked me to leave them out, and then after the book was published liked them’); Bullen separately issues them as The Tables of the Law & The Adoration of the Magi (1897); WBY alienated from nationalism by violence of Jubilee Riots, 1897; writes further esoteric fiction; accompanies Gonne on tour of Irish communities in England and Scotland; keeps an occult diary, July 1898-March 1901; invited by Lady Gregory to carve his name on the beech tree in Coole Park, summer 1898; reading anthropological writings of Frazer, Gerald Heard and Flinders Petrie; commences “Vision Notebook”, 11 July 1898, continued sporadically to March 1901; contrib. “The Celtic Element in Literature” to Cosmopolis (June 1898; dated 1897, 1902 in 1902 edn.); contribs. to the Celtic Congress, 1901 (as reported in Celtia); writes letter to Freeman’s Journal (13 Nov. 1901) affirming role of artist as ‘principal voice of the conscience’; Gonne discloses her affair with Lucien Millevoye, resulting in a ‘spiritual marriage’ with WBY, 7 Dec. 1898; proposes to Gonne in Paris, and is refused, 31 Jan. 1899; issues The Wind Among the Reeds (1899), ending with the lively vernacular and somewhat earlier ballad “The Fiddler of Dooney”; formation of the Irish Literary Theatre announced in the press under the auspices of a sub-committee of the National Literary Society, 16 Jan. 1899; his play The Countess Cathleen: A Miracle Play, performed by the Irish Literary Theatre in Antient Concert Rooms, 8 May, 1899, with Florence Farr as Aleel, after assurances from Fr. Thomas Finlay that there was nothing blasphemous in the play; object of pamphlet by Frank Hugh O’Donnell objecting the play showe the Irish as ‘unmanly, an impious and renegade people’ [see under FHO’D - supra]; WBY made the personal target of the young Patrick Pearse’s call that the literary revival be ‘crushed’ in a letter to An Claidheamh Soluis (13 May 1899); WBY publishes ‘Ireland Bewitched’, with Lady Gregory, in Contemporary Review (1899; Welch, eds., Writings 1993); resigns from IRB with Gonne following plot to murder Frank Hugh O’Donnell, 1900; death of Susan Yeats (WBY’s mother); writes in favour of Irish language revival ‘because the mass of the people cease to understand any poetry when they cease to understand the Irish language, which is the language of their imaginations’ (The Leader, Sept. 1900); caught up in major row in the Order of the Golden Dawn, involving Aleister Crowley (“Brother Perdurabo”) Yeats, along with a fellow member (an amateur boxer), repulsed Alaistair Crowley when the latter attempted to secure the secret rituals of the Temple in rooms above a builder in London, April 1900 (‘Battle of Blythe Road’); [March], April 1900 - leading to Mathers’s expusion from Isis-Urania, April 1900; Yeats elected Instructor in Mystical Philosophy, March 1900; continues as a member until 1923 [1921]; inaugurates Irish Literary Theatre at a meeting of the National Literary Society, January 1899; launches Beltaine, journal of the Irish Theatre, May 1899 (3 issues, 1899-1900);

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1900-03: publishes in first issue thereof a defence of The Countess Cathleen and its symbolism; witnesses the Fay brothers’ production of Alice Milligan’s Red Hugh and acknowledges the possibility of using the Dublin accent for Irish drama; proposes marriage to Gonne and is again refused; lectures on psalteries with Florence Farr; writes to Dublin Daily Express (3 April 1900), stating that anyone who cheers Queen Victoria on her visit to Dublin would do dishonour to Ireland; collaborates with Moore on Diarmuid and Grania, set to music by Elgar, resulting in estrangement; the play performed, 21 Oct. 1901 (pub. Dublin Mag., 1951); launches Samhain, early 1901 (7 issues, 1901-06, and 1908; to be followed by The Arrow, 1906-07, and 1909); issues “Is the Order of the R.R. & A.C. to Remain a Magical Order?” (March 1901); Maud Gonne appears in title role of his play Cathleen ni Houlihan at St. Teresa’s Abstinence Association Hall, Clarendon St. (2, 3, & 4 April 1902); publ. an interpretation of the play in United Irishman (5 May 1902); Yeats family returns to Ireland, setting at Gurteen Dhas, Churchtown, Dundrum, where his Elizabeth (“Lollie”) soon fnds. the Dun Emer Press; joins Moore and Douglas Hyde in denouncing destructive excavations conducted by seekers for the Ark of the Covenant at Tara (letter to Times, 27 June 1902); argues for recognition of ‘that English idiom of the Irish-thinking people of the west’ as ‘the only good English spoken by any large numbers of Irish people today’ (Samhain, Oct. 1902); meets James Joyce, Oct. 1902; reading Nietzsche helps him ‘greatly to build up in [his] mind an imagination of the heroic life’ [letter of thanks for books to John Quinn, 6 Feb. [1903]]; returns to London, Nov. 1902; becomes President of Irish National Theatre Society, Feb. 1903, based on the Fays’ Irish National Dramatic (formerly Ormonde) Society, and with Maude Gonne, George Russell and Douglas Hyde as Vice-Presidents, and W. G. Fay as stage-manager; receives telegram before a lecture to Wild Geese Society (Bijou Th., Bedford St., London), informing him that Gonne is to marry MacBride, as she does on 21 Feb. 1903; particularly stung by her conversion to Catholicism; issues “Speaking to the Psaltery” [contrib. to Monthly Review, ed. Henry Newbolt (May 1902)], an essay based on research with Florence Farr into the use of voice-music with Arnold Dolmetsch’s 12-stringed instrument; brief affair with Farr, 1903; dissociates himself from decadent aestheticism of his earlier essay “Autumn of the Body” in letter to George Russell, 4 March 1903; talks with Gonne and re-establishes friendship, May 1903; signs protest against King’s visit to Dublin, May 1903; joins Felkin in Stella Matutina (aka “Amoun Temple”) when Temple splits with Waite’s Holy Order of the Golden Dawn, 1903; writes letter to United Irishman commenting facetiously on decoration of the king’s room at Maynooth during the royal visit of Edward VII and Queen Alexandra (1 Aug 1903); fights with Gonne and others over Synge’s Shadow of the Glen (Oct. 1903); issues Ideas of Good and Evil (1903), a volume of essays [named after Blake], substituted for The Speckled Bird by agreement with Bullen; sails to America, 4 Nov. 1903, on American tour arranged by John Quinn (Nov. 1903-March 1904); receives news of trouble in Gonne-MacBride marriage while in America, Nov. 1903; plans to establish Abbey Theatre with subvention form tea-heiress Annie Horniman;

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1904-09: writes short plays such as The Pot of Broth (1903) and The Hour Glass: A Morality (1903), both in 1902; also heroic plays including The King’s Threshold (7 Oct. 1903), in Molesworth Hall, with designs by Miss Horniman, printed in In the Seven Woods (1904), the first book to be issued by Dun Emer Press [later Cuala Press], with the Caslon Old Face type used for all 78 books thereafter; Abbey Theatre opens in renovated premises of the Mechanics’ Institute [27 Abbey St.], 27 December 1904 with programme with new plays by WBY and Lady Gregory (On Baile’s Strand and Spreading the News), as well as Cathleen Ni Houlihan and Synge’s In the Shadow of the Glen; acts as Abbey Manager, 1904-1910; WBY revises The Secret Rose with Lady Gregory, bringing the stories ‘closer to the life of the people’ [by means of ‘Kiltartanese’], excluding “The Book of The Great Dhoul, and Hanrahan the Red” whilst adding “Red Hanrahan” (Stories of Red Hanrahan, 1905) - later to remark, ‘if their style has any merit now, that merit is hers’; reiss. The Tables of the Law & The Adoration of the Magi (Elkin Mathews 1904) - citing James Joyce as ‘a young man in Ireland the other day, who liked them very much’ [p.(4)]; WBY issues Poems 1899-1905 (1906); WBY, Lady Gregory, and Synge installed as Directors of the Abbey, 1906; institutes a working distinction between ‘poetic plays’ and ‘peasant drama’, Fay managing the latter; publishes Discoveries (1907), a prose collection; Deirdre premiered at the Abbey, 26 Nov. 1906 (pub. 1907), with costumes by Miss Horniman and scenery by Robert Gregory; later performed in London with Mrs. Patrick Campbell in lead, 1908; Abbey tours in Ireland and Britain with The Eloquent Dempsey, a political farce by William Boyle, Lady Gregory’s The Doctor in Spite of Himself (trans. into Kiltartanese from Molière), and WBY’s Deirdre; first performance of The Playboy of the Western World, and attendant Abbey riots, Jan. 1907 (Lady Gregory sends telegram to WBY, ‘Audience broke up at use of the word ‘shift’); absents himself from funeral of John O’Leary, March 1907, though in Ireland; travels to Italy with Lady Gregory and her son Robert, 1907 - visiting Ferrara (where Duke Ercole had reigned), Florence, and Venice, staying at Lady Layard’s Ca Capello; entranced by art of Sienese School and soon after adds paragraph to “Tables of the Law” attributing such an interest to Aherne; first encounters Byzantine art at Ravenna and espoused the courtly ideals of Castiglione but suffered from colds and rheumatism; JBY departs for New York, 1907; WBY meets Ezra Pound on the latter’s arrival in England, 1908 [?prev. in US in 1903?]; Dun Emer Industries becomes Cuala Industries and Press, 1908; Wade issues the first bibliography of his writings, 1908 (rep. in Variorum Edition, 1957, p.779); briefly consummated relationship with Gonne, Dec. 1908 before the ‘spiritual marriage’ is resumed (‘I am praying still that your bodily desire for me may be taken from you too’, wrote Gonne); reading through Balzac, 1908-09; at death of Swinburne, Yeats said to his sister: ‘I am the King of the Cats’, 1909;

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1910-13: Iseult Gonne speaks to WBY in terms that he understands as a marriage proposal, 1910; breach with John Quinn lasting years due to indiscreet talk about his mistress, only to be resolved in 1911; death of Synge, 24 March 1909; edits Synge’s Poems and Translations (1909); love-affair with Mabel Dickinson, physiotherapist (masseuse; sis. of Dublin architect and critic), 1908-1913, ending acrimoniously when she claims to be pregnant (whereon WBY consults Lady Gregory and a clairvoyant, Elizabeth Radcliffe, practitioner of automatic handwriting [which Georgie Yeats may have observed]; Collected Works in Prose and Verse in (8 vols. 1908) published by A. H. Bullen at the Shakespeare Head Press, with financial aid of Miss Horniman; issues The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910), including poems grouped as ‘Raymond Lully to his wife Pernella’ (later emended to ‘Nicholas Flamel’), dealing with Maud Gonne; issues Poetical Works of William Blake (Routledge 1910), erroneously calling Blake Irish; receives a civil pension listing, negotiated by Edmund Gosse and permitting him to continue his political work in Ireland; the Gregorys receive a letter from Gosse condemning their interference in the matter, and leading to WBY’s chief rift with them; WBY writes long (and probably unposted) letter of self-analysis to Robert Gregory (2 Aug. 1910; quoted in Ellmann, 1948, p.179); Miss Horniman alienated by production of Shaw’s Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet (Abbey, Feb 1910) and further alienated by purportedly inadvertant failure to close Abbey following death of Edward VII (6 May 1910); WBY visits his father in New York during first Abbey American tour, 1911; peaceful first night of Playboy in Boston followed by riots in New York (‘stink pots and rosaries’); second night attended by Theodore Roosevelt; company technically arrested in Philadelphia; threats to Lady Gregory’s life in Chicago; WBY’s interest in spiritualism revives on meeting an American medium Eta Wreidt, resulting in first introduction to Leo Africanus, “guide”, talks to J. M. Synge (‘said he was happy but when he saw me longed to live’), and hears voice of Maud Gonne through Mrs. Wreidt’s trumpet, Feb. 1911; issues ‘The Folly of Argument’, an essay, in Manchester Playgoer (June 1911); in May 1911 meets [Bertha] Georgiana Hyde-Lees (called ‘Georgie’ and ‘George’ by WBY alone), dg. of Nelly Hyde-Lees and step-daughter of Olivia Shakespear’s brother H. T. Tucker whom she married in Feb. 1911; admitted to rank of Theoricus Adeptus Minor in Stella Matutina (successor to Golden Dawn), and thus certified by Felkin, 10 Jan. 1912; meets Rabindranath Tagore, 1912; refuses to sign assurance addressed to Ulster Unionists that Home Rule would not be sectarian; meets Miss X [Radcliffe?], whose automatic handwriting he subjects to tests, 1912-14; issues The Cutting of the Agate (pub. in NY, 1912), essays on tragic drama; writes letter to Grierson thanking him for edition of Donne, Nov. 1912; stays with Maud Gonne at Les Mouettes in the village of Colleville, Calvados, Normandy, 1912; poems of appear in Poetry (Chicago), altered by Pound without permission; controversy surrounding the Hugh Lane Bequest of Impressionist paintings to the Municipal Gallery brings his disillusionment with Irish nationalism to a head, 1913; toured in America, 1912-13, and arranged sale of MSS to John Quinn with the cost being given unexplained to his father, JBY, living in New York; publishes “September 1913, or Romance in Ireland”, signed “Dublin, September 7th 1916, appearing in The Irish Times, 7 Sept. 1913, and berating the Irish bourgeoisie for defection from patriotic standards, the gombeen materialism [‘greasy till’], contemporaneously with Lock-Out Strike in which Jim Larkin, Labour leader, was confronted by William Martin Murphy for the capitalists of Dublin; lectures on “Dreams and Ghosts” (Dublin, Nov. 1913) and is mocked by The Irish Times; receives civil list pension of £150, 1913 [but see supra]; Dublin Corporation rejects Hugh Lane’s gift, 1913; takes rooms at Stone Cottage, Ashdown Forest, with Pound as his ‘secretary’, during winters of 1913-16; contribs. “Dublin Fanaticism” to Irish Worker (1 Nov. 1913), rebuking employers for using religion as a weapon in the Lock-Out Strike and nationalists for failing to protest at police brutality; issues Poems Written in Discouragement (1913); reintroduced to Georgiana Hyde-Lees at Tucker’s house house in Ashdown Forest, 1913, in company with Ezra Pound and Dorothy Shakespear, George’s best friend; [cont.]