A Study Guide for William Butler Yeats's "Autobiographies"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for William Butler Yeats's "Autobiographies," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Nonfiction Classics for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Nonfiction Classics for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Sep 20, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535818940

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Autobiographies

William Butler Yeats

1955

Introduction

William Butler Yeats's Autobiographies, originally published in 1955, is a collection of essays written by a man many consider to have been the greatest poet in the English language. The first essays, Reveries Over Childhood and Youth (1915) and The Trembling of the Veil, (1922), cover Yeats's life through his late twenties. In 1936, another four autobiographical essays were published, Dramatis Personae, Estrangement, The Death of Synge, and The Bounty of Sweden, extending Autobiographies well into the poet's fifties, when he received the Nobel Prize for Literature.

While the information contained in these essays is roughly in chronological order, Yeats's goal seems to be not to catalogue exact details about his life but to deliver a sense of how he became the man he was. The pages of his autobiography are filled with the names of hundreds of friends and enemies and of societies formed and joined, contributing to a picture of a man passionate for Ireland and Irish nationalism. Writing from the vantage point of the early part of the twentieth century, Yeats acknowledges many of his past errors in judgment and admits to some bitterness over attempted projects that did not end well. In the later pages of his autobiography, Yeats covers his years of contributing to the Abbey Theater in Dublin, a place in which he made his long-time dream of an Irish national dramatic movement a reality. In addition, in the essays, Yeats reveals his increasing fascination throughout his life with the supernatural and mysticism.

Author Biography

William Butler Yeats was born June 13, 1865, in Sandymont, Ireland, to John Butler Yeats, a lawyer who later became a painter, and Susan Mary Pollexfen Yeats. He was the eldest of four children. The Protestant Anglo-Irish society into which Yeats was born was the minority in Ireland but had dominated Irish life and politics for hundreds of years. Unlike most of his fellow Anglo-Irish, who regarded England as their true home, Yeats considered himself primarily Irish, and his passion for Irish independence from England colored his life as an artist from the very beginning. He incorporated Irish heroes and heroines into his poetry and other writings.

As a child, Yeats was not a good student and instead desired to spend time walking around his beloved Irish countryside. Most of Yeats's childhood was spent in London, but he was able to soak up Irish stories and legends during his frequent trips to Ireland to visit relatives. He attended art school in Dublin between 1884 and 1886 and eventually decided that his talent was not in painting.

In 1885, at the age