(collected from Wiki pedia)
My arms are like the twisted thorn
And yet there beauty lay;
The first of all the tribe lay there
And did such pleasure take;
She who had brought great
Hector down
And put all Troy to wreck.
In 1896, Yeats was introduced to
Lady Gregory by their mutual friend
Edward Martyn. Gregory encouraged Yeats' nationalism, and convinced him to continue focusing on writing drama. Although he was influenced by French
Symbolism, Yeats concentrated on an identifiably Irish content and this inclination was reinforced by his involvement with a new generation of younger and emerging Irish authors. Together with Lady Gregory, Martyn, and other writers including
J. M. Synge,
Seán O'Casey, and
Padraic Colum, Yeats was one of those responsible for the establishment of the "
Irish Literary Revival" movement. Apart from these creative writers, much of the impetus for the Revival came from the work of scholarly translators who were aiding in the discovery of both the ancient sagas and Ossianic poetry and the more recent folk song tradition in Irish. One of the most significant of these was
Douglas Hyde, later the first President of Ireland, whose
Love Songs of Connacht was widely admired.
Abbey Theatre
In 1899, Yeats, Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn and
George Moore established the
Irish Literary Theatre for the purpose of performing Irish and Celtic plays. The ideals of the Abbey were derived from the avant-garde French theatre, which sought to express the "ascendancy of the playwright rather than the actor-manager
à l'anglais."The group's manifesto, which Yeats wrote, declared "We hope to find in Ireland an uncorrupted & imaginative audience trained to listen by its passion for oratory... & that freedom to experiment which is not found in the theatres of England, & without which no new movement in art or literature can succeed."
The collective survived for about two years but was not successful. Working with two Irish brothers with theatrical experience,
William and
Frank Fay, Yeats' unpaid-yet-independently wealthy secretary
Annie Horniman, and the leading West End actress
Florence Farr, the group established the Irish National Theatre Society. Along with Synge, they acquired property in Dublin and on 27 December 1904 opened the Abbey Theatre. Yeats' play
Cathleen Ní Houlihan and Lady Gregory's
Spreading the News were featured on the opening night. Yeats remained involved with the Abbey until his death, both as a member of the board and a prolific playwright. In 1902, he helped set up the
Dun Emer Press to publish work by writers associated with the Revival. This became the
Cuala Press in 1904, and inspired by the Arts and Crafts Movement, sought to "find work for Irish hands in the making of beautiful things." From then until its closure in 1946, the press—which was run by the poet's sisters—produced over 70 titles; 48 of them books by Yeats himself.
In 1909, Yeats met the American poet
Ezra Pound. Pound had travelled to London at least partly to meet the older man, whom he considered "the only poet worthy of serious study." From that year until 1916, the two men wintered in the Stone Cottage at
Ashdown Forest, with Pound nominally acting as Yeats' secretary. The relationship got off to a rocky start when Pound arranged for the publication in the magazine
Poetry of some of Yeats' verse with Pound's own unauthorised alterations. These changes reflected Pound's distaste for Victorian prosody. A more indirect influence was the scholarship on Japanese
Noh plays that Pound had obtained from
Ernest Fenollosa's widow, which provided Yeats with a model for the aristocratic drama he intended to write. The first of his plays modelled on Noh was
At the Hawk's Well, the first draft of which he dictated to Pound in January 1916.
The emergence of a nationalist revolutionary movement from the ranks of the mostly Roman Catholic lower-middle and working class made Yeats reassess some of his attitudes. In the refrain of "
Easter, 1916" ("All changed, changed utterly / A terrible beauty is born"), Yeats faces his own failure to recognise the merits of the leaders of the
Easter Rising, due to his attitude towards their humble backgrounds and lives.
Marriage to Georgie
By 1916, Yeats was 51 years old and determined to marry and produce an heir. John MacBride had been executed by British forces for his role in the
1916 Easter Rising, and Yeats thought that his widow might remarry.His final proposal to Maud Gonne took place in the summer of 1916. Gonne's history of revolutionary political activism, as well as a series of personal catastrophes in the previous few years of her life, including
chloroform addiction and her troubled marriage to MacBride made her a potentially unsuitable wife
and biographer R.F. Foster has observed that Yeats' last offer was motivated more by a sense of duty than by a genuine desire to marry her.
Yeats proposed in an indifferent manner, with conditions attached, and he both expected and hoped she would turn him down. According to Foster "when he duly asked Maud to marry him, and was duly refused, his thoughts shifted with surprising speed to her daughter."
Iseult Gonne was Maud's second child with
Lucien Millevoye, and at the time was twenty-one years old. She had lived a sad life to this point; conceived as an attempt to reincarnate her short-lived brother, for the first few years of her life, she was presented as her mother's adopted niece. When Maud told her that she was going to marry, Iseult cried and told her mother that she hated MacBride. At fifteen, she proposed to Yeats. A few months after the poet's approach to Maud, he proposed to Iseult, but was rejected.
That September, Yeats proposed to 25-year-old
Georgie Hyde-Lees (1892–1968), whom he had met through Olivia Shakespear. Despite warning from her friends—"George ... you can't. He must be dead"—Hyde-Lees accepted, and the two were married on 20 October. Their marriage was a success, in spite of the age difference, and in spite of Yeats' feelings of remorse and regret during their honeymoon. The couple went on to have two children,
Anne and
Michael. Although in later years he had romantic relationships with other women and possibly affairs, George herself wrote to her husband "When you are dead, people will talk about your love affairs, but I shall say nothing, for I will remember how proud you were."
During the first years of his marriage, he and George experimented with
automatic writing, and George contacted a variety of spirits and guides they called "Instructors." The spirits communicated a complex and esoteric system of characters and history, which the couple developed during experiments with the circumstances of trance and the exposition of phases, cones, and gyres. The spirits notified George that they were ready to communicate by filling the Yeats's house with the scent of mint leaves. Yeats devoted much time to preparing this material for publication as
A Vision (1925). In 1924, he wrote to his publisher T. Werner Laurie admitting: "I dare say I delude myself in thinking this book my book of books
" Off we go to the west -- to Illionos. I hope I shall get rest there for which I long. Though it is too early for me to pronounce any opinion on this country I must say I do not like it. America, like an unripe fruit, has not got its proper flavour yet. It has a sharp and acid taste . I haven't tried to see the people to whom you have given me introduction for fear of being drawn into engagement ." 
On 1st Nov, during day, flashed with rain, Rabindranath reached Urbana. His arrival was circulated in The Daily Illini, the news bulletin of University of Illionos in 1st Oct, just one month earlier. 
