William Yeats - Writings on Irish Folklore, Legend and Myth

PENGUIN TWENTIETH-CENTURY CLASSICS

WRITINGS ON IRISH FOLKLORE, LEGEND AND MYTH

William Butler Yeats was born in Dublin in 1865 into an artistic family and spent his childhood in Sligo, Dublin and London. In Dublin he enrolled at the Metropolitan School of Art in 1884. The next year he became a founder-member of the Dublin Hermetic Society; in time this led him to the Esoteric Section of the Theosophical Society and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (1890). He developed a life-long interest in magic, the occult and the supernatural, which influenced much of his thinking and writing, and which achieved its most complete expression in the expository speculations of A Vision (1925; revised version 1937).

Yeatss home was most often in London, though he visited Ireland frequently. For a while he was close to the politics of Irish nationalism, not least because of his long infatuation with the revolutionary Maud Gonne, to whom he unsuccessfully proposed on many occasions. From an early stage, he devoted his energies much less to direct political action than to the cause of an imaginative nationalism which involved him in the collection of folklore (notably in The Celtic Twilight, 1893), in the creation and management of a national theatre for which he wrote a body of plays (five of which presented the epic hero Cchulainn), and in the critical reinterpretation and advancement of the Irish literary tradition.

In 1915 Yeats refused a knighthood from the British government; in 1922 he became a Senator of the newly founded Irish Free State, and finally settled in Dublin with Georgie Hyde-Lees, whom he had married in 1917 and whose automatic writing became the basis of A Vision. In 1917 he also purchased a Norman stone tower in Ballylee, Co. Galway, and this provided the symbolic focus for The Tower (1928) which is, perhaps, his richest collection of poetry. Yeats left a vivid record of his life and of his friends and acquaintances in the volumes which were collected as Autobiographies and in the franker Memoirs (not published until 1972). He died at Roquebrune, France, in January 1939.

Robert Welch is Professor of English at the University of Ulster, Coleraine. He has published Irish Poetry from Moore to Yeats (1980), A History of Verse Translation from the Irish (1988) and Changing States: Transformations in Modern Irish Literature (1993). He is the editor of The Oxford Companion to Irish Literature and was chairman of the International Association for the Study of Anglo-Irish Literature from 1988 to 1991. He has edited a number of volumes of essays, and a book of his poems, Muskerry, appeared in 1991. He is married with four children and lives in Portstewart.

Timothy Webb is General Editor for the works of W. B. Yeats in Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics.

W. B . YEATS

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WRITINGS ON IRISH FOLKLORE,
LEGEND AND MYTH

EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION
AND NOTES BY ROBERT WELCH

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This edition first published in Penguin Books 1993

This edition copyright Robert Welch, 1993

The Midnight Court is reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., from Explorations by W. B. Yeats. Copyright 1962 by Mrs W. B. Yeats

Compulsory Gaelic and The Great Blasket are reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., from THE COLLECTED WORKS OF W. B. YEATS, Vol. X, edited by Colton Johnson. Writings by W. B. Yeats copyright 2000 by Anne and Michael Yeats. Editorial matter copyright 2000 by Colton Johnson.

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ISBN: 978-0-14-196099-9