51 Fun Facts About W. B. Yeats

In Yeats's early poem The Stolen Child, who lures the child away?

Faeries: they coax the human child to come away with them, since the world, they say, holds more weeping than he can understand.

Which county did Yeats regard as his childhood and spiritual home, his "country of the heart"?

Sligo: his mother's wealthy Pollexfen family came from there, and he spent childhood holidays in the county.

In Yeats's poem Leda and the Swan, which god takes the form of the swan?

Zeus: the poem looks ahead to what the union sets off, the Trojan War and the death of Agamemnon.

Which long Yeats poem, drawn from the Fenian Cycle of Irish myth, gave its title to his 1889 collection?

The Wanderings of Oisin ends back in Ireland: leaning from his fairy horse to fling a sack of sand, Oisin snaps the saddle girth and lands a man three hundred years old.

Which secret society of ritual magic did Yeats join in 1890?

The Golden Dawn drew in Georgie Hyde-Lees too: she joined in 1914, and three years later she married Yeats.

Which occultist did MacGregor Mathers send against Yeats's side in the 'Battle of Blythe Road'?

Aleister Crowley had been refused promotion by the London adepts, so Mathers overrode them and initiated him into the order's inner grade himself, in Paris.

What did Yeats take "Leo Africanus", a spirit voice heard at séances, to be?

Yeats's Daemon or anti-self, Yeats decided, and he wrote the spirit letters about his doubts, then wrote Leo's replies himself.

Yeats co-founded which London club in 1890, whose members he later called the "Tragic Generation"?

The Rhymers' Club looked doomed in hindsight: many members died young, among them Ernest Dowson at 32 and Lionel Johnson at 35.

Which forgotten poem did Yeats rediscover while editing the first complete Blake edition?

Vala, or, The Four Zoas was an unfinished manuscript Blake gave up on around 1807; its text first reached print in the 1893 edition Yeats made with Edwin Ellis.

Which Irish party did Maud Gonne help found?

Sinn Féin grew out of the National Council, which Gonne and Arthur Griffith set up in 1903 to campaign against King Edward VII's visit to Ireland.

What did Maud Gonne say the world gained when she refused Yeats?

His poetry: she told him his unhappiness fed it, and he kept turning her into verse, casting her as Helen of Troy in 'No Second Troy'.

Whom did Maud Gonne marry in 1903, to Yeats's dismay?

Major John MacBride had fought the British in the Boer War; Gonne became a Catholic four days before their Paris wedding, against both families' wishes.

What did a Paris court grant Maud Gonne when she sought to end her marriage?

A legal separation, not a divorce, and she won custody of their son Seán, while her husband went back to Ireland.

Where was Maud Gonne actually born, despite her claims of Irish descent?

Near Aldershot in England; she spent part of her childhood in Ireland after her father, an army captain, was posted to the Curragh.

After Maud Gonne's last refusal, whom did Yeats propose to next?

Her daughter Iseult had proposed to Yeats herself at fifteen, and he had turned her down; this time she was the one who refused.

What practice by Yeats's wife early in their marriage produced the material for A Vision?

Automatic writing began on their honeymoon, when George tried it to distract her brooding husband.

Which Yeats play was the Irish Literary Theatre's first production, in 1899?

The Countess Cathleen sells her soul to the devil to save her starving tenants; Yeats dedicated the play to Maud Gonne.

What had part of the Abbey Theatre's building once been?

The city morgue: the old hall had no room for a lobby, so the adjoining morgue became the theatre's entrance.

Which wealthy English patron paid for the conversion that created the Abbey Theatre?

Annie Horniman soon started a repertory company of her own in Manchester, though she went on paying toward the Abbey until 1910.

What did Yeats fear Cathleen ni Houlihan had done?

Got men shot, Yeats feared in The Man and the Echo, since the play ends with an old woman calling young men to die for Ireland.

In Cathleen ni Houlihan, the old woman's "beautiful green fields" represent what?

The provinces of Ireland are her four stolen fields; once a young man leaves to fight for her, she is seen walking away as a young girl with the walk of a queen.

Which American poet wintered with Yeats at Stone Cottage from 1913 to 1916?

Ezra Pound was nominally Yeats's secretary, and after marrying Dorothy Shakespear in 1914 he brought his new wife to the cottage for the next two winters.

Yeats's play At the Hawk's Well (1916) was the first he modelled on which theatrical tradition?

Japanese Noh, with its masks, dance and song, let Yeats write for a small audience of initiates instead of the crowds of the public theatre.

Which American writer's way of life did the teenage Yeats hope to imitate on Innisfree?

Henry David Thoreau had built himself a cabin by Walden Pond, and the poem's speaker also dreams of building a small cabin on the island.

Which poem's refrain is "A terrible beauty is born"?

Easter, 1916: Yeats admits he had once exchanged only polite meaningless words with the rebels the Rising transformed.

Which woman does Yeats portray among the rebels in his poem on the Rising?

Constance Markievicz, whose death sentence for her part in the Rising was commuted on account of her sex.

In Yeats's cyclical system, how often do the gyres reach a crisis that births a new civilisation?

Every two millennia, Yeats believed, so the era that began with Christ's birth was ending in his own century, and a new order was due.

Which 1958 novel by Chinua Achebe takes its title from a line in The Second Coming?

Things Fall Apart borrows the poem's third line for its story of an Igbo clan's old order collapsing under colonial rule and missionaries.

No Country for Old Men takes its title from which Yeats poem's opening line?

Sailing to Byzantium has an aging man leave the country of the young for Byzantium, hoping to shed his dying body and live on as a golden bird.

The Wild Swans at Coole was written at Lady Gregory's home, Coole Park, in which county?

Galway is where Coole Park stands, and there Yeats counted fifty-nine swans on the lake, sensing he had aged while their hearts had not grown old.

What was Yeats's Nobel lecture about?

Irish theatre: in his lecture The Irish Dramatic Movement he recalled that Dublin's theatres had been empty buildings hired by English touring companies.

Yeats's Nobel citation praised poetry that gives expression to the spirit of what?

A whole nation, said the citation, and Yeats knew the symbolic value of an Irish winner so soon after independence.

In 1922, Yeats was appointed to which body?

The Free State Senate, which Yeats left in 1928 on health grounds, moving to winter in the warmth of Rapallo, Italy.

Opposing a ban on divorce, Yeats said of his fellow Irish Protestants: 'we are no ...' what?

"Petty people" they were not, Yeats insisted, warning that if the South were governed by Catholic ideas alone, 'you will never get the North'.

The committee Yeats chaired chose Percy Metcalfe's designs for what?

The Free State's first coinage, whose animals were reworked on the advice of agricultural experts before minting, a compromise Yeats regretted.

For which Irish quasi-fascist movement did Yeats compose marching songs in the 1930s?

The Blueshirts got marching songs from Yeats, but his entanglement with Eoin O'Duffy's movement proved brief.

What "rejuvenating" procedure did Yeats undergo at 68, giving him what he called a "strange second puberty"?

The Steinach operation was really a half vasectomy, and afterwards Yeats began a relationship with the poet and actress Margot Ruddock.

Yeats edited which anthology in 1936?

The Oxford Book of Modern Verse left out Wilfred Owen, because Yeats held that 'passive suffering is not a theme for poetry'.

Where did Yeats die in January 1939?

On the French Riviera, and because the Second World War broke out that autumn, nine years passed before his remains were brought home to Ireland.

In Yeats's The Song of Wandering Aengus, what does the silver trout the speaker catches become?

A glimmering girl, who calls him by name and vanishes, and he spends the rest of his life wandering in search of her.

Yeats's epitaph comes from the closing lines of which late poem?

Under Ben Bulben also names his resting place, Drumcliff churchyard, and Yeats wrote its last lines to be carved on his gravestone.

Yeats's poem An Irish Airman Foresees His Death is set during which war?

The First World War: the airman was modelled on Robert Gregory, Lady Gregory's only child, a pilot killed in 1918 whom Yeats mourned in four poems.

In Yeats's He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven, what does the speaker spread under his beloved's feet?

His dreams, being too poor for heaven's embroidered cloths, and in the film Equilibrium a cleric caught reading Yeats's poems is executed for it.

Yeats wrote the introduction to the 1912 English translation of which work by Rabindranath Tagore?

Gitanjali moved him so much that he read the manuscript on trains, omnibuses and in restaurants, often shutting it lest a stranger see how it stirred him.

Which J. M. Synge drama set off riots at Dublin's Abbey Theatre in 1907?

The Playboy of the Western World angered nationalists, and when O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars sparked riots in 1926, Yeats told the crowd, 'You have disgraced yourselves again.'

Which paranormal research organisation did Yeats join in 1911?

He was also influenced by Emanuel Swedenborg and wrote in 1892 that 'the mystical life is the centre of all that I do'.

In 1885 the Theosophist Mohini Chatterjee introduced young Yeats to which religion's ideas?

Hinduism, and more than four decades later Yeats wrote a poem titled 'Mohini Chatterjee' recalling the Brahmin's teaching.

Which poet wrote the elegy In Memory of W. B. Yeats in February 1939, weeks after Yeats died?

W. H. Auden wrote it soon after moving to America, calling Yeats 'silly like us' yet granting in the same line that his gift survived it all.

What caused W. B. Yeats's death in January 1939?

Heart failure, though Yeats kept writing almost to the end, and his Last Poems and Two Plays came out later that year.

Yeats said his poem Down by the Salley Gardens was an attempt to reconstruct what?

An old folk song: Yeats built the poem by adding a few lines of his own to fragments he had heard sung in a village.

Which seaside village near Dublin was Yeats's family home in the early 1880s?

Howth: the teenage Yeats, fascinated by biology, spent afternoons roaming its cliffs.