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The Company He Kept
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16592 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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9 / 1997 |
2,037 Words |
| Author
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Linda Simon
Linda Simon is professor of literature at Skidmore College
and a frequent contributor to The World & I. |
W.B. YEATS: A LIFE
Vol. I: The Apprentice Mage
R.F. Foster
New York: Oxford University Press, 1997
640 pp. $35.00
William Butler Yeats has had no lack of eminent biographers, including Richard Ellmann, Joseph Hone, and A. Norman Jeffares, but R.F. Foster comes to Yeats with a considerably new perspective: that of historian rather than literary critic.
"What is needed," writes Foster, "is this kind of biography: not another exegesis of the poetry from a biographical angle, not an analysis of the development of his aesthetic theories," but a restoration of "the sense of the man involved in life, and in history: notably in the history of his country, at a time of exceptional flux and achievement." For Foster, the history of Ireland from Yeats' birth in 1865 until his death in 1939 went beyond political turmoil to include cultural transformation, a reformulation of national identity, and a search for spirituality that involved Yeats and many of his friends in explorations of the occult.
Yeats (Foster refers to him as WBY throughout the book) was born in Dublin in 1865, the first child of Susan Pollexfen Yeats and the painter John Butler Yeats, as bohemian a father as one could find in nineteenth-century Ireland. Because the elder Yeats wanted to study painting and partake of the thriving British art world, WBY spent much of his childhood in London. None of the family felt comfortably at home in England, however, most notably thin, lanky, sickly
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