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[somber music]

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- "Out of Ireland have we come.

"Great hatred, little room maimed us at the start.

"I carry from my mother's womb

"a fanatic heart."

In 1966, I was 14,

and Ireland marked the 50th anniversary of its 1916 Rising.

Across that Easter week,

the one television station that most

of the country could receive

was filled with the most appalling,

mawkish, emotional, nationalistic guff.

I felt divorced from my own.

I was engaged in the now and

not what seemed to me the prehistoric.

For others, it stirred the politics of hatred,

that found a response

in the killings in the north of this island

a mere two years later.

[solemn music]

In my classroom,

a priest began to read the poetry of W. B. Yeats.

Now, here, I recognized immediately,

was the country I belonged to.

Here was Ireland articulated,

a modern, plural, open, generous country.

"Blast of dusty wind and after,

"thunder of feet, tumult of images,

"their purpose in the labyrinth of the wind."

[hand thumps]

[laughs] I mean, you get so annoyed it's so good, you know.

So who was he, this poet?

He was the oddest, bravest,

downright weirdest of revolutionaries.

And he never killed a living soul.

Yet it was his revolution that won in the end.

The revolution of the Irish mind.

[somber music]

But it was the uprising against the British,

fought mostly in Dublin's General Post Office

across Easter week a century ago

that continues to be the central point

of both celebration and controversy.

Over the course of a few days,

hundreds died in a shambolic engagement.

What happened next,

when the British executed the rebellion's leaders,

set the tone of Ireland's often tragic political situation

for the next 100 years.

I want to say that the poet W. B. Yeats

not only deserves a place

on the national pantheon of liberation

occupied by the men and women

who fought and died in this building,

but actually in front of them.

Yeats sang this country into being

by imagining the creation myths

so necessary, so required,

for building the modern, pluralist,

intellectual underpinnings and institutions

necessary for the nation-state.

As Gogarty said, there is no free state without Yeats.

And by that, he meant that Ireland doesn't exist

without the poet.

[somber music]

Modern Ireland was not born 100 years ago,

but 70 years before that

in the charnel house of the Irish famine.

Inconceivable hundreds of thousands died of mass starvation,

while millions of others escaping the horror

slipped away on migrant ships bound for viability.

The land lay empty.

This was Ireland's year zero.

Centuries of dispossession and defeat

had dulled the brain to anything other than brute survival.

Just over a decade later,

Yeats is born into the Protestant landowning ruling caste.

With devastation all around,

the authority of that class, his class, was destroyed.

Ireland itself and its language was in flux,

desperate to be remolded into the new.

We just needed someone to magic it into life.

- "I had this thought a while ago.

"My darling cannot understand

"what I have done or what would do

"in this blind, bitter land."

[solemn music]

- Willie Yeats was born in interesting times

and to an interesting family.

His father, John Butler Yeats,

was a South Dublin barrister with good prospects.

Everything was perfectly Victorian and lovely and proper.

His dad then decided

that this wasn't going to be for him.

He suddenly drops his family, drops everything

and heads off to London,

where he enrolls in the Slade School of Art.

And from then on,

they live a life of complete poverty.

Now, I think this is an act of great bravery.

His family thought it was an act of insanity.

But in so much else at that time,

I think his father was really feeling the moment.

This was a point of soon-to-be cultural revolution

as opposed to armed insurrection.

There was a difference.

And he was completely rejecting

the background that he had inherited.

He was the ultimate bohemian

and he set out to live the ultimate bohemian's life.

He was determined not to bring his children up

as he had been brought up, with those expectations.

He kept them away from school.

Why, because he said of Willie Yeats,

"The boy must learn to believe in art and poetry

"and the sovereignty of the intellect and the mind."

[delicate music]

To escape this bohemian penury,

Willie Yeats' mother would regularly take her children

to her family, the Pollexfens, a prosperous trading dynasty

based in Sligo town in the northwest of Ireland.

Susan Yeats bringing her brood to Sligo

is the birthplace of W. B.'s dreamlike vision of Ireland.

It's sort of sad that his mother

is left out of the equation so much.

Take me through the family.

- Yeats' mother's family

is in some ways much more important in his background

than his father's family.

They provide the background

that the kids go to in Sligo in the summers.

They are in Merville, this nice big house

with servants, with fires, with ample everything.

Very much integrated into that world

of the Protestant bourgeoisie

of a prosperous Irish provincial town.

But its hinterland is this magic landscape

of lakes and mountains

and myth and magic,

which is conveyed to them by the servants,

who tell them these stories,

and the local children with whom they play.

For Yeats and his sisters, Lily and Lolly,

and his brother, Jack,

that is their absolute formative experience.

- That hinterland revolved around Rosses Point,

a few miles outside of Sligo town.

What a playground for the shy, dreamy kid and his siblings.

This is the place where this crazed,

imaginative family took off.

In fact, in the frontispiece of this book is

a reproduction of Jack Yeats' Memory Harbour,

which was Willie's favorite painting of his,

and many people's favorite painting.

It actually is a brilliant piece of work.

And here's the little road here.

At the time, there were beautiful cottages,

unfortunately all gone,

leading up to where we're standing now, Elsinore.

This is the old pilot

that used to take Willie and Jack fishing.

They'd go out for a day's fishing

and they'd come back and they'd sit around

and the pilot would tell them stories

and there'd be other kids here.

And it doesn't matter, you know, what age you're from.

I mean, why would you just not remember that always forever

as being a part of your life that was wonderful?

With the wind, you know, crackling away outside,

you can see the lads running home and, you know,

full of stories and scared stiff

that they were going to bump into a fairy, wraith,

or hear the banshee wailing.

Funny as that is as a kid,

everyone was afraid of that stuff, you know.

Out here, Willie was immersed in fairy folklore.

But this wasn't Peter Pan and Tinkerbell stuff,

this was dark, pagan, malevolent,

and utterly accepted, completely believed.

There was another world as tangible

and real and dangerous as this one.

The night Willie's three-year-old brother died of croup,

his mother said she heard the wailing

of a witch-like harbinger of death

the Irish called the Banshee.

- "Away with us he's going.

"The solemn-eyed.

"He'll hear no more the lowing of the calves

"on the warm hillside,

"or the kettle on the hob

"sing peace into his breast,

"or see the brown mice bob

"round and round the oatmeal chests.

"For he comes, the human child,

"to the waters and the wild,

"with a fairy, hand in hand,

"from a world more full of weeping

"than he can understand."

He did say a wonderful thing.

He said that the Sligo sea cliffs gave tongue to his poetry.

That's no small sentence.

[somber music]

- [Bob] The west of Ireland had endured

the worst agonies of the great famine.

That can't have gone unnoticed by the young Willie Yeats.

Stories and songs of ghosts, spirits, shades, banshees,

angry tales of loss,

stolen lives and vanishing responsibilities.

- From 1801, Ireland has been part of Britain.

But the famine comes along and it turns out

that you're not really British if you live in Connemara

in the same sense that you would be if you lived in Surrey,

and that you are a surplus population

and your children don't matter

and, you know, this entire culture can disappear

and no one will care.

And I think part of Yeats' brilliance

is that he is one of the first people to see

this will have to be rescued

and myself and my friends are gonna have to do it.

And it's the stage one in his evolution as a writer,

is to just try to put his arms around the wreckage

and see, is there anything left there?

- Yeats was caught in the half-light, a Celtic twilight,

a moment where nobody knew who or what they were.

Everything could be remade, rewritten.

The ancient folktales and fairy stories

that Willie heard here

ignited a lifelong fascination with Irishness

and with the other,

a kind of escape from reality

where he could find imagery and metaphors for his writing.

Yeats wrote, "The mystical world is at the center

"of all I do, think, and write."

All of that started here in that little pilot's cottage

and listening to the stories.

- "Though I am old with wandering

"Through hollow lands and hilly lands

"I will find out where she has gone

"And kiss her lips and take her hands

"And walk among long dappled grass

"And pluck till time and times are done

"The silver apples of the moon

"The golden apples of the sun."

[lively music]

- Whilst Sligo ignited his mystical, spiritual side,

in London, with its vast, swirling stew,

the center of global, political,

economic, and cultural action,

Yeats found himself thrillingly at the very heart

of European revolutionary ideas.

Depending on the state of the family finances,

the Yeatses flitted between lodgings in Dublin and London.

He was educated between the two cities,

actually training to be an artist like his dad and brother.

It was a time of new ideas,

socialism, anarchism, Marxism, Darwinism, the death of God,

the search for new answers,

opening different doors of perception.

It was like the '60s, fueled by hashish and mescaline.

Willie became more obsessed with the numinous,

the mystical and spiritual,

mingling with theosophists,

Rosicrucianists, Kabbalists, gurus, swamis,

and the secretive, bizarre Order Of The Golden Dawn.

You have to envy Willie and the wild London he arrived into.

You can do Dublin in two days.

You know, you can walk through it and find its things.

You can't do London in a lifetime, I've found.

Getting lost here is one of the best educations

you could possibly have.

[lively music]

But this was also the year of salon culture,

decadence, symbolists, literary clubs,

and endless debate at places like the Cheshire Cheese.

By the time 22-year-old W. B. arrived in 1887

full of fairy tales and Celtic mysticism,

London would have loved him.

Even though he'd barely published

a handful of plays and prose,

London and Europe were alive

to what would eventually be called the Celtic Revival.

Young Willie found himself in the right city

at the right time and in the right house.

He ended up here, in a sort of artists' colony

specifically built for that purpose called Bedford Park.

And he found a cheap, a very cheap house,

as Willie called it, spelling it C-H-E-E-P.

He was a hopeless speller all his life.

It cost 50 quid per annum,

and that was largely because the drains were a bit dodgy.

Now, it's pretty mega, really.

I mean, you'd pay a lot of money for these places.

It's beautiful, isn't it?

It's hard to think about the

absolute poverty that this family lived in.

There was often literally no food in the house.

Clothes were never changed for anything new,

and even when it was down to the last,

literally, the last penny,

there was a vote in the family as what to spend it on

and the majority chose to spend that last penny

on the Pall Mall Gazette,

which Lily in her diary remarked, "Money well spent."

[lively music]

Yeats was just another young Irish playwright

and occasional poet.

But at Christmas 1888,

he was invited for lunch with the glamorous Wildes.

That day, Oscar jealously recognizing

the young poet's genius, held forth

on just how bad the Irish actually were at poetry.

"Brilliant failures," he called them.

But more crucially, the great star told W. B.

it wasn't simply enough to be a poet,

you had to look like a poet,

you had to act like a poet.

Willie rephrased it later,

"Myself I must remake,"

the start of a lifelong fascination with image, masks,

the constant reinvention of the artist.

With myself I must remake,

this Wildean and utterly modern concept

was made concrete.

I believe at that precise moment,

and possibly the realization that occurred in this room

or in his bedroom upstairs,

W. B. Yeats, the poet that we know, was born.

Yeats the poet was coming into focus.

He was creating the man and the myth.

All he needed was the muse.

Then, in January 1889, a beauty came to call.

A notorious young English-born Irish nationalist,

a feminist, activist,

Ireland's Joan of Arc they would call her,

and she was about to ignite

Ireland's greatest unrequited love story.

As Willie said, "The troubling of my life began."

Maud Gonne pulled up outside that window

in a hansom cab

and she wandered into the room here

and the family were stunned

by this great star, this beauty.

It just all coalesced.

Here was the image of the Ireland he foresaw.

She was pulling him in

to that orbit that she inhabited

of radical nationalism.

He was there willing and ready for it,

particularly in London,

as he dreamt of this idyllic other Ireland.

He became as militantly nationalistic as she was,

as patriotic as any of the great rebels.

And he had found a way of expressing that,

of focusing on it through her

in a way that never killed anybody.

- "Because of that great nobleness of hers

"The fire that stirs about her when she stirs

"Burns but more clearly

"O she had not these ways

"When all the wild summer was in her gaze

"O heart! O heart!

"If she'd but turn her head

"You'd know the folly of being comforted."

- She needs a country and a cause.

And in Yeats, he found the troubling of his life,

and she found a poet for the cause.

Isn't that really it?

- They're both in search of authenticity

but it's a different kind of authenticity.

Yeats is also looking for an Irish authenticity,

because he is this marginalized, odd,

at an angle to the universe Protestant.

She's looking for an authenticity

because she is a ruthless peripatetic.

Her beloved father dies, she doesn't have a mother.

Neither of them, in a sense, has a mother, it's interesting.

And I think they are looking for something to cling to.

They were immensely close as friends,

leaving aside the sexual aspects of his obsession with her.

- "When you are old and gray

"And full of sleep and nodding by the fire

"Take down this book and slowly read

"And dream of the soft look your eyes had once

"And of their shadows deep."

- "How many loved your moments of glad grace?

"And loved your beauty with love, false or true?

"But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you

"And loved the sorrows of your changing face."

- He always classicizes her,

which in a sense lifts her out of the everyday.

As he always said, she doesn't belong in this world.

What's she doing here?

- "I had a thought for no one's but your ears

"That you were beautiful, and that I strove

"To love you in the old high way of love

"That it had all seemed happy

"And yet we'd grown as weary-hearted

"As that hollow moon."

God, it just grips you, that last line, every time!

I thought I won't tear up on that.

But, fuck, it just does, anyway. [laughs]

- She gets this endless sort of stuff.

I mean, put yourself in her position.

What do you think, does she go, "I just went to his house

"and I sat in a bloody chair, you know?

"Had a cup of tea, you know."

I mean, that would be it, wouldn't it?

And he's going, "Oh, my love," you know.

- Oh, come on.

- I'm not going, oh, come on.

I'm saying, what would you do if you were her?

- Well, that's why I say come on.

You know perfectly well

that if somebody is completely mad about you

and telling you,

that's the least attractive thing possible that can be done.

The way to have someone in love with you

is clearly not to be in love with them.

And when you get this kind of almost abasing

stuff being sent to you, it's the biggest turnoff there is.

- "Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths

"Enwrought with golden and silver light

"The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

"Of night and light and the half-light,

"I would spread the cloths under your feet

"But I, being poor, have only my dreams.

"I have spread my dreams under your feet.

"Tread softly because you tread on my dreams."

- If he came along to you and said,

"Edna, when you're old and tired

"and gray and full of sleep,

"take down this book and read and dream of this,"

I mean, would you swoon and just shag him?

- Probably, yeah.

- See, that's it.

[somber music]

Maud was a radical, a hard and violent revolutionary.

Willie, Willie was a lovestruck dreamer.

No doubt she helped focus those dreams

at a time when Charles Stewart Parnell

was leading a democratic charge for Irish home rule,

while the Irish Republican Brotherhood

were stirring the boiling pot of revolt.

But W. B. Yeats simply believed in Ireland,

in its stories, its legends, its dream time, and its people.

He wanted to go back beyond oppression and rebellions,

beyond famine, beyond Christianity,

to an earlier time of Homeric warrior heroes.

And he was doing it afresh in the English language,

making it modern, relevant, full of magic and wonder.

On a visit to Douglas Hyde in Roscommon,

Yeats discovered Castle Island in Lough Key,

where he and Maud imagined creating a new Irish faith,

an order of Celtic mysteries,

to awaken an Irish sense of identity.

Not anti-English, just uniquely Irish.

The perfect combination of her nationalism

and his mysticism.

Maud Gonne would have been mad for it.

I mean, absolutely she would have loved this.

And he sort of said, "Well, we can also make it into

"an island of heroes, Celtic heroes."

He sort of was edging towards getting her on board

so that he could be with her, so that, you know,

the love affair could continue on several planes,

mystic as well as carnal.

I'm sure in the back of his mind he thought,

Maud and I will end up here,

this is perfect for us, you know.

It is terminally romantic.

[solemn music]

Unfortunately for Willie,

Maud was more in love with revolution than romance.

[lively music]

Like many a young Irishman before and since,

W. B. Yeats in 1880s London is broke.

He's in love with a girl who doesn't want him.

He's waiting for his first book to come out

and he's an unmade man,

a sexually frustrated virgin.

He's full of longing for success,

for Maud, or for home, for Ireland.

But clearly he missed Sligo when he first came.

You know, that longing for that which is familiar,

those smells, those sights, those relationships.

[somber music]

The kind of poetry W. B. Yeats was dreaming into life

would need to be written with distance from afar,

on literally the concrete empiricism

of the gray pavements of the capital of the world.

The literary revival he was at the center of

was fueled by an unspecific yearning,

inventing a new idealized version of the self,

of a people, of Ireland.

The Celtic Twilight, or Cultic Toilette,

as James Joyce, the young punk tyro would later call it,

was triggered by a memory,

a city street, a sign, a woman, a shop window.

Keep your eye open for fairies, will you, Smithy?

- [Smithy] I will, yeah.

- He adored this part of the world,

pined for this, pined for it.

So I'm not surprised, given his financial circumstances,

his romantic circumstances, his family circumstances,

his panic over his first big book,

that you want to get out.

You know, you want to escape,

you want to run away, you can't.

And I suppose the word free pops into everyone's mind.

- [W. B.] "I will arise and go now and go to Innisfree

"And a small cabin build there

"Of clay and wattles made

"Nine bean-rows will I have there

"A hive for the honey-bee

"And live alone in the bee-loud glade."

- "And I shall have some peace there.

"For peace comes dropping slow

"Dropping from the veils of the morning

"To where the cricket sings.

"There midnight's all a glimmer

"And noon a purple glow

"And evening full of the linnet's wings."

- [W. B.] "I will rise and go now

"For always night and day

"I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore."

- Oh, it is lapping, listen.

"I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore."

- [W. B.] "While I stand on roadway

"Or on the pavements gray

"I hear it in the deep heart's core."

- The choice of words is masterly.

You know, nine bean-rows, a hive for the honey-bee,

the bee-loud glade.

You don't ever have to come here, you know,

he's just done it for you.

[melancholy music]

Dublin in the 1880s was the second city of the Empire

and just as much a hotbed

of political thought and debate as London.

Yeats was beginning to believe

not just in a romantic Ireland

but one that could stand culturally and politically

on its own two feet.

He would be a fervent nationalist all his life

and he put that down to meeting just one man in 1885,

the old Irish revolutionary called John O'Leary.

Willie's father, J. B., brings him along one day

to meet fellow intellectuals in the Contemporary Club.

Yeats meets this sort of patriarchal figure

who is a revolutionary.

O'Leary had said, "We need a poet."

Of course he would say that,

he was one of the Young Irelanders.

That's how you got ideas across.

And he was waiting, waiting,

and this beautiful boy walks into the room

and he's the son of his friend

and he reads his, sort of,

you know, his early stuff, which is still amazing.

And he goes, "He's the fellow."

And he brings him along.

He instructs him, he takes him under his wing.

[melancholy music]

O'Leary had been tried for treason

in the year W. B. was born

and he helped found the Irish Republican Brotherhood,

a secret organization whose sole aim

was an independent, democratic Irish Republic,

and whose oath swore absolute allegiance to that aim.

Bizarrely, an oath O'Leary himself refused to take.

Ultimately, the IRB would be the cabal

at the heart of the 1916 Easter Rising.

It's almost certain that Yeats took the oath,

the revolutionary oath.

And he may very well have done that because he believed it,

or to be in with the lads, or to further his career,

or to, you know, tip the wing to Maud that

I'm a fellow traveler here, you can count on me.

I'm with you all the way, Maud, now can we shag?

[solemn music]

By the 1890s, W. B.'s words were growing in stature.

But his political, spiritual, and emotional life

revolved around his Helen of Troy, his beloved Maud.

To Willie, she was Ireland,

but she had never been fully honest with him.

The year she met him,

she'd had a son with a right wing French radical

called Lucien Millevoye.

When that son died of meningitis,

Maud Gonne could not hide her grief

but told Willie the child wasn't hers, that it was adopted.

To try to help in any way,

W. B. brought Maud to see his friend

and mystic writer and artist, A. E. George Russell,

in this room on Ely Place,

home of the Dublin Theosophical Society.

The plan was to hold a seance

to discover if Maud's dead child could be reincarnated.

They sit down and the seance occurs

and whatever signals A. E. is getting from the other side,

he turns around and to Maud's great comfort,

he says, "Yes, it is possible.

"It's possible to reincarnate your child

"and it's possible to reincarnate your child

"within your family."

Maud goes tearing back to Paris, to Millevoye,

who she's long given up,

and she takes him about 60 miles out of Paris

to the tomb of her now long-dead, buried son

and the two of them have sex

in the vault of the tomb of their child

in order to reincarnate him

and bring him back to the family.

It's so weird and odd

and pitiful and sad.

They were so out there, excitingly out there,

so open to any mad ideas.

But a child resulted from that experiment,

a beautiful child, Iseult Gonne,

who of course 22 years later

Yeats would ask to marry.

I think it's apt that in this room of all,

we do The Pity Of Love.

"A pity beyond all telling

"Is hid in the heart of love.

"The folk who are buying and selling

"The clouds on their journey above

"The cold, wet winds ever blowing

"And the shadowy hazel grove

"Where mouse-gray waters are flowing

"Threaten the head that I love."

Throughout his life, Willie seemed attracted

to dark, tragic, often violent women.

But despite the sexual temptations which London offered

and the unrequited obsessive desire for Maud Gonne,

he was to reach 31 before he lost his virginity.

And when he finally did so, [lively music]

it was most likely in his tiny flat

near Euston Station in London,

and it was to an older, gentler,

more experienced married woman, Olivia Shakespear.

It was an absolute disaster.

Olivia took him shopping for the bed

in which he would be deflowered.

I don't know which was worse for Willie,

the shopping or the sex.

He was dismayed by the business of shopping.

Olivia came in and she started bouncing up on the beds,

and he was in a fever of embarrassment

and fear of the coming act,

that at 31 he was finally going to do it.

So this was the big moment.

Understandably enough, poor Willie

failed miserably to perform.

He later said, "She was too wholesome to my inmost being."

He craved a violent eroticism,

in his mind personified by Maud.

That same year, another woman was about to enter

Willie Yeats' life.

She and her home were probably more important to Yeats' work

than even Maud.

The woman's name was Augusta Gregory, Lady Gregory,

one of the local bigwigs.

She took him away to this place, here.

This is Coole, Coole Park and Coole House.

And this is all that remains, unfortunately, of it.

This is the area of it.

This plinth I'm standing on

is the foundation platform for the whole house.

He would run here, he would retreat here.

This was a second home.

Yeats' job was to be a poet in the same way

that someone is a bus driver or an accountant.

You get up in the morning to write poems.

He labored and worked and worked and worked

to reduce, to reduce, to get to the very essence

of what it was that he wanted to say.

Days, weeks, sometimes months on some poems.

This is what he got here.

This is what he was able to do,

withdraw from the freneticism of his committees,

his desperate need to be in these esoteric societies.

And he could take the experiences of the last few months,

come to Coole, let it drain down into some essence.

And that's what he's explaining in this,

I keep saying this is one of the greats, you know.

He was explaining the craft of this thing

but he was able to hone and direct that craft

particularly here at Coole.

I hope I look languid and romantic enough to read this poem.

I chose this tree and this pose specifically,

so, you know, I hope it's working.

"Adam's Curse.

"We sat together at one summer's end

"That beautiful mild woman, your close friend

"And you and I, and talked of poetry.

"I said, a line will take us hours maybe.

"Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought,

"Our stitching and unstitching has been naught."

- "Better go down upon your marrow-bones

"And scrub a kitchen pavement

"Or break stones like an old pauper,

"in all kinds of weather.

"For to articulate sweet sounds together

"Is to work harder than all these

"And yet be thought an idler by the noisy set

"Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen

"The martyrs call the world."

[somber music]

- One early summer, he was ill and very depressed

and Lady Gregory, he says,

"brought me from cottage to cottage

"while she began to collect stories.

"As that ancient system of belief unfolded before us

"with unforeseen probabilities and plausibilities,

"it was though we had begun to live in a dream."

Him and Gregory would walk through the woods at Coole

looking for impressions made in the ground by

fairy troops or wraiths

or fairy forts that they'd left behind.

And they'd see bits of wood lined at an angle

and they were absolutely convinced they were in,

they were living in this dream.

He was at this stuff from the very beginning.

He was at this stuff over in the pilot's cottage

over at Rosses Point.

What got me into him really

and his importance beyond being a poet,

his importance just in Ireland,

is the fact that that guy took down these things,

made them into our literature, but I equated it with

a musical history I'm more familiar with,

which is the history of America.

There was a man called Alan Lomax

who went around the Appalachian Mountains

and the southern states of America.

So he started recording and transcribing

all the stories and all the songs

and giving them all to the Library of Congress.

And this was the background of America,

this was America's story.

Now, Yeats did that.

There's just no question of it.

He gave the Irish, in a moment of great confusion and loss,

he told them who they were.

He said, "It's not all dispossession and defeat.

"Go back long before the endless fighting and invasions.

"Have you heard of Fionn mac Cumhaill?

"Have you heard of Cuchulainn?"

They had, but not in the sense of

this glorious, elegant, dignified ancestry.

Halfway between Dublin and Belfast stands an ancient stone.

Cuchulainn, Ireland's great warrior hero,

mortally wounded in battle,

is said to have strapped himself to this rock

so he might die standing.

As I learned in Africa,

you can't create a nation by simply drawing lines on a map.

Every people needs a creation myth,

its own Cuchulainn's stone, its own stories.

As Yeats said,

"There is no fine nationality without literature

"and no fine literature without nationality."

And along with the other scholars

who were digging up the stories

and translating them from the Irish,

he elevated these heroes,

Fionn mac Cumhaill, Oisin, Cuchulainn,

into a pantheon of heroes that we should aspire to,

that can be emulated in the creation myth of a new country.

A nation is the political expression of a people.

If there isn't a people, you can't build the state.

And the only way you can build a state

is by building the institutions,

the scaffolding upon which a constitution can hang.

[lively music]

Yeats was the great mover behind a modern art gallery,

a ballet academy, and the National Academy of Letters.

But the greatest institution Yeats created

with Augusta Gregory and their protege,

a young playwright called John Synge,

was the Abbey Theatre, today our National Theatre.

They became the triumvirate

at the heart of what Yeats aspired to,

a national literature in English for the Irish,

not anti-English but pro-Irish,

about what we are, not what we are against.

It was revolutionary with pens instead of guns.

No surprise its emblem is the mythical Queen Maeve,

and the first character to speak on stage

on its opening night was Cuchulainn.

- He writes somewhere that he realizes

that the Irish don't read,

that that whole part of our culture,

you know, is not a big thing,

but that they might go to shows.

It's just fantastic

to see this stern, austere figure of Yeats

with a light bulb moment going,

"Maybe if we opened a theater, they might come along."

- And it just goes to the whole punk aspect of it.

You know, the punk thing was a reaction

against the professionalism,

the 72-track studios of the thing,

the sort of prog rock musicality of the bands.

No, strip that out, go back to attitude,

go back to the roots of the music and anyone can do it.

But I can't play guitar?

Doesn't matter, pick it up and make a noise.

Yeats and Gregory and Synge were going to make a noise.

Even if you were an amateur two years ago, like Synge,

you were gonna make a noise.

Even if you were an amateur like Gregory,

you were gonna make a noise.

It was this central core group of revolutionaries

who were provoking, who were disturbing,

who needed the debate to happen.

It could not just be owned by the advanced nationalists,

i.e. those who were quite prepared

to pick up the gun and go.

[dramatic music]

The war drums were beating louder.

W. B. and Maud had chaired a committee

to celebrate the centenary of the failed 1798 rebellion.

There had been violent protests at Queen Victoria's Jubilee,

and later at her visit to Dublin.

Yeats himself publicly supported the Boers

in their fight against British colonialism.

In this boiling pot,

he was challenged by more hardline Republicans

to write a Nationalist play.

It's not his finest hour.

Co-written with Augusta Gregory

as a star vehicle for Maud Gonne,

essentially playing Ireland,

the play is not important because of its genius,

far from it, but its impact.

And it happened in this very room,

where they are now, to Willie's dismay, I'd imagine,

building a nail bar and tanning salon.

God, it's small.

And this is where

the appalling Cathleen ni Houlihan was first staged.

So the old woman,

who represents Ireland, says,

"Sometimes my feet are tired and my hands are quiet,

"but there's no quiet in my heart.

"When the people see me quiet,

"they think old age has come in me

"and that all the stir has gone out of me.

"But when the trouble is on me,

"I must be talking to my friends."

Bridget, "What was it put the trouble on you?"

Old woman, "My land that was taken from me!"

Peter, "Was it much land they took from you?"

"My four beautiful green fields!"

Which is the pose

you see the photographs of Maud Gonne striking,

precisely this.

Fuck off!

But it was that stuff

that sent a very astute critic,

Stephen Gwynn, reeling.

And he writes in his diary,

"The effect of Cathleen ni Houlihan on me

"was that I went home asking myself

"if such plays should be produced

"unless one was prepared for people

"to go out to shoot and be shot."

After the Rising,

Yeats, in his later poems,

as an older man, much after the Rising,

questions himself and says,

"Did certain of my plays send out some men to be shot?"

And the answer is maybe not,

but the atmosphere which he created,

and we're talking about a monstrous box office hit

for those days, it was played again and again,

certainly contributed to the overall war drums

being beaten ever more feverishly.

- "All that I have said and done

"Now that I am old and ill

"Turns into a question

"Till I lie awake night after night

"And never get the answers right.

"Did that play of mine

"Send out certain men the English shot?

"Did words of mine put too great strain

"On that woman's reeling brain?"

- [Bob] Yeats' nationalism [tense music]

and his belief in an independent Ireland

was never in doubt.

But his old mentor John O'Leary had said,

"There are some things a man must not do to save a nation."

Whatever way the road forked,

W. B.'s path was cultural revolution,

the pen, not the sword.

What ultimately distanced W. B. Yeats

from the revolutionary cause was a broken heart.

Maud Gonne, in the cauldron of nationalist fervor,

married John MacBride, a Republican hero

who had fought with the Boers against the Empire.

But he was also a drinker

and this perfect rebel marriage was doomed.

- The MacBride marriage is essentially a publicity,

not a publicity stunt, but it's a,

it had big propagandist values.

Two icons of Republican resistance marry each other

and are sworn to bring down the British Empire

and are photographed in a publicity shot

for a French magazine with their new baby

with lots of guns on the table in front of them.

And the caption is Three Irish Revolutionaries in Paris.

You know, it's a very, very public and very publicized.

- Is it the Bonnie and Clyde of Republicanism?

- In a way.

The squalid and long drawn out

and publicized separation case,

they don't get a divorce, they're Catholics after all,

but there is a legal separation,

drags in all sorts of allegations of his drunken behavior

and his alleged molestation of young women,

including Iseult, allegedly.

This shocks Yeats, who believes all this implicitly,

very much indeed.

But what he's even more,

well, as shocked by, is that traditional IRB people,

nationalists, men close ranks around MacBride

and in many ways exorcize Maud Gonne

and have her hissed at in public and so forth.

And the Neanderthal and patriarchalist attitudes

of the old IRB guard around MacBride,

who include, by the way, John O'Leary,

is a deep disillusionment to him.

- "Why should I blame her

"That she filled my days with misery

"Or that she would of late have taught to ignorant men

"Most violent ways

"Or hurled the little streets upon the great

"Had they but courage equal to desire?

"What could have made her peaceful

"With a mind that nobleness made simple as a fire

"With beauty like a tightened bow

"A kind that is not natural in an age like this

"Being high and solitary and most stern?

"Why, what could she have done, being what she is?

"Was there another Troy for her to burn?"

- [Bob] On the eve of World War I, Yeats was approaching 50,

with no Maud and no marriage in sight.

"I have no child," he wrote dismissively about his life,

"I have nothing but a book."

He was turning bitter, sharper, angrier.

For some, he's the poet, already a national treasure.

For others, he's a pompous Anglo-Irish Protestant

taking a civil list pension from the King.

He feels Ireland is growing away from him.

It's not the romantic Ireland he's tried to sing into life.

He rails against Dublin's

new bourgeois Catholic conservatism,

against a grubby materialism

and against militant nationalism.

- "What need you, being come to sense

"But fumble in a greasy till

"And add the halfpence to the pence

"And prayer to shivering prayer

"Until you've dried the marrow from the bone.

"For men were born to pray and save.

"Romantic Ireland's dead and gone.

"It's with O'Leary in the grave."

- [Bob] W. B. Yeats puts his voice

and his support behind John Redmond,

his Irish Parliamentary Party, and democratic freedom.

In 1914, the Home Rule Bill is passed.

Ireland has finally and peacefully secured its independence.

But it's deferred because of the Great War

and implacable Unionist opposition.

- [Reader] "Things fall apart.

"The center cannot hold."

- [Reader] "But I am old and you are young."

- [Reader] "I carry from my mother's womb a fanatic heart."

- [Reader] "That is no country for old men.

"The young in one another's arms."

- [Reader] "Changed utterly.

"A terrible beauty is born."

[solemn music]

- Oh, that's great.

It's a beautiful drawing.

I've never seen it even reproduced.

But what's really interesting about this,

where this sort of touches history,

is that this is exactly Yeats,

exactly Yeats at the moment that the guns

were firing in O'Connell Street

on Easter Monday in 1916.

This is what he was doing.

He was being sketched by his friend,

the artist William Rothenstein,

in his house in Gloucestershire where he was staying.

Of course, this was before he knows

that at this moment that this is being drawn

that people are being killed and being shot

and being fired at.

But the shock of Easter week

has a profound effect on him

and, of course, on the country,

but more specifically his art.

"Hurrah for revolution and more cannon-shot!

"A beggar upon horseback lashes a beggar on foot.

"Hurrah for revolution and cannon come again!

"The beggars have changed places, but the lash goes on."

[explosion booms]

♪ When Irish eyes are smiling

♪ Sure is like a morn in spring

- The Easter Rising lasted six days

and left nearly 500 dead.

When the leaders were captured and executed by the British,

the ensuing outrage led to more carnage and death

and ultimately, many think, to Irish independence.

But I believe the glorification of what happened in the GPO

stained my country's history in blood for decades.

There are no creation myths here.

It's just a post office.

This isn't the foundation stone of anything.

This isn't the crucible of revolution.

No, that's over in the execution yards of Kilmainham.

This isn't the cradle of our national Bethlehem.

This is the original sin

of a mismanaged, misgoverned,

often abusive, and corrupt state.

This is the foul rag and bone shop of the national heart,

which, as Yeats so brilliantly reminds us,

is where all the ladders start.

[somber music]

I find myself very conflicted by the idea of

the blood sacrifice in heroism,

the delirium of death.

Dying is very easy.

I've been around it a lot.

It isn't radical to die, it's inevitable.

Staying alive is hard.

Life is hard.

Staying alive to change and implement change

must be what it's about.

Dying, for a cause?

Whose cause, the individual's?

Hoping that something will come out of it.

This ludicrous notion of death or glory

or death and glory escapes me.

W. B. Yeats didn't die for Ireland.

He stayed alive to fight for Ireland,

a better, inclusive, progressive version of Ireland,

and to fight against the version I eventually fled,

petty, censorious, Catholic narrow-mindedness

fixated with the false glory of martyrdom.

Had they converted into a project of self-sacrifice?

- Well, there I think we come back to the

Catholicisation of the thing,

in retrospect, and to Pearse's writings,

very cleverly aimed at exactly this interpretation of it,

which were released, written just before the Rising

and released just after it,

where the whole thing is written into, inscribed into

the tradition of Catholic sacrifice and of mysticism

and of the way of the cross

and of Calvary and all the rest of it.

The other thing is that the calculation is,

and this does seem to be the case, this isn't retrospective,

that they knew they would be executed

and that this would bring about a response

in public opinion in Ireland,

and there they were absolutely right.

- Fine, meanwhile at the end of all this,

you get 500 people dead.

I mean, how dare they?

- You may say how dare they?

But for them, the 500 people dead were worth the reward,

which was a revived, radical, Republican.

- And Stalin would have exactly the same point.

- Perhaps.

- So the people of 1916 are an elite,

a revolutionary elite blinded by,

you know, blood-dimmed revolutionary lust.

- You say that, I didn't say it.

- [Bob] I know but I am saying it.

- They're certainly a revolutionary elite.

And they're certainly bent on.

- So what, he would have approved of that.

- They're bent on the vertigo of self-sacrifice.

And that's how Yeats will both

commemorate them and remember them.

[somber music]

- "O but we talked at large before the 16 men were shot.

"But who can talk of give and take

"What should be and what not

"While those dead men are loitering there

"to stir the boiling pot?

"You say that we should still the land

"till Germany's overcome.

"But who is there to argue that now Pearse is deaf and dumb?

"And is there a logic to outweigh MacDonagh's bony thumb?

"How could you dream they'd listen that have an ear alone

"For those new comrades they have found,

"Lord Edward and Wolfe Tone,

"Or meddle with our give and take

"That converse bone to bone?

- Hero Tales And Legends Of The Serbians.

This is Yeats' library

that his wife gave to the National Library.

These are the books.

This is what surrounded him all his life.

Oh, here we go, George Moores.

Oh, Shelley and Blake.

Yeah, they're his two touchstones, aren't they?

Look at this, Folklore In The Old Testament.

The Waste Land.

"For William Butler Yeats Esquire

"in admiration of his work, T. S. Eliot."

These are his own editions of his own works.

So I have to wear the gloves

that made famous on endless history programs.

And these are, from Ireland's point of view,

almost sacred texts.

And why not?

- "I have met them at close of day

"Coming with vivid faces

"From counter or desk among gray 18th-century houses.

"I have passed with a nod of the head

"Or polite meaningless words

"Or have lingered awhile and said polite meaningless words

"And thought before I had done of a mocking tail or a gibe

"To please a companion around the fire at the club,

"Being certain that they and I

"but lived where motley is worn

"All changed.

"Changed utterly.

"A terrible beauty is born."

- The events of 1916 took him aback,

and he didn't quite know how to respond to it.

Then, of course, like everybody else,

he recoiled at what the authorities did to the leaders,

which was a serious political mistake, of course,

and just went with the cackhandedness and misgovernment

of what was coming from London.

He sat down and put his own doubt

and shock and questioning

into one of the most powerful poems of the century

in any language.

- "Was it needless death after all?

"For England may keep faith

"For all that is done and said.

"We know their dream.

"Enough to know they dreamed and are dead."

- "And what if excess of love

"Bewildered them till they died?

"I write it out in a verse.

"MacDonagh and MacBride

"And Connolly and Pearse

"Now and in time to be wherever green is worn

"Are changed, changed utterly.

"A terrible beauty is born."

Brilliant.

[foreboding music]

One person wasn't so sure that Yeats got it right,

his inspirational muse

and great love of his life Maud Gonne.

And now, because of the Rising,

this fanatic Republican icon was a widow.

Maud is outraged by this Easter, 1916.

She thinks he's betrayed the actual Rising itself.

- "No, Willie, I do not like your poem,"

begins this terrific, terrific letter.

I think it's one of the great political poems

because of its ambivalence,

but it does reflect the upheavals of his own life

during that summer, with Maud, with her daughter Iseult.

And I think the stanza about the stone of fanaticism

in the stream of life is very much about.

- This obsession with one idea that blocks any other.

- Maud is the unspoken presence in that poem.

It's probably his last great love poem to her.

But I think the main thing is the man is in the throes

of what can only be called a nervous breakdown.

He is at the absolute edge of self-control.

It's the fallout of 1916 into 1917.

His horoscopes have told him

all sorts of world-shattering things are happening.

He's looking for certainty everywhere,

as he has done in the strangest places

over the last few years.

- [Bob] The 18 months after the Rising

saw W. B. descend into spirals of confusion and depression

about politics but also about his own personal life.

He's a 52-year-old bachelor, and as many horoscopes,

seances, and visits to mediums insist,

he must be married by the end of the year.

In this state of panic,

Willie heads to Normandy to visit Maud

and her travelling menagerie

of parrots, monkeys, dogs, and cats.

He proposes one last time and she turns him down again.

Then, literally, he turns and walks along the beach

to her 22-year-old daughter Iseult and proposes to her.

After all, she'd flirtingly proposed to him

just two years earlier.

- "O you will take whatever's offered

"And dream that all the world's a friend,

"Suffer as your mother suffered,

"Be as broken in the end.

"But I am old and you are young

"And I speak a barbarous tongue."

- Iseult says no. [somber music]

In this emotional meltdown, Willie thinks,

well, who else do I know?

So the now hysterical Yeats heads straight back to England

and proposes to Georgie Hyde-Lees, the daughter of a friend,

who says okay.

Within days, under pressure of the horoscope deadline,

the happy couple arrive at a London register office.

But Lily, Willie's own sister, took to her immediately.

"She is not good-looking but is comely.

"Her nose is too big for good looks, her color ruddy,

"and her hair reddish brown.

"Her eyes are very good in a fine blue

"with very dark, strongly marked eyebrows.

"She is quiet but not slow.

"Her brain I would judge quick and trained and sensitive."

In fact, everyone remarked on the intelligence of the woman.

Yeats, although now married and on his honeymoon,

was still in a complete state of panic.

Had he let down Maud or Iseult?

Was he betraying his new wife

by not being fully committed to her?

That's when Georgie displayed her true talents.

[solemn music]

- So he'd met his deadline.

He had got married by that astrological deadline.

Hurrah, he'd found somebody less than half his age

who was willing to marry him.

That's a great success.

That's not a failure, that's a success.

So they get married, they go on honeymoon,

they go down to this little hotel just south of London.

And first night, nothing happens sexually.

Second night, nothing happens sexually.

Third night, it's really disconcerting for her.

It's really stressful.

And they, between them, decided

to start doing some automatic writing.

And she starts doing this automatic writing.

- Wasn't that bonkers, actually?

- No, it wasn't that bonkers.

- Well, you would say that because.

- Yeah, I would say that, wouldn't I?

- Selling bonkers books in this book shop, you know,

with this hippie sofa and stuff, you know.

- She comes from an occultist background.

He comes from an occultist background.

It's a thing that she knows about.

It's a thing that he knows about.

It's a thing that he's very keen that she does.

And she sits down to do it

and she starts and they get some results.

He loves it, he absolutely loves it.

- It transpires Georgie had the ability

to connect the pen in her hand

to the great wisdom of some unknown spiritual instructors.

Willie would ask a question

and Georgie's pen would automatically write out an answer.

For Willie, this was the pinnacle

of a lifetime of spiritual quest,

new ideas, new metaphors for his poetry.

Roy Foster called it a factory for mysterious images.

And Willie didn't want it to stop.

But isn't that always what all of this was about,

from the fairy legends to the folk legends

to the Rosicrucianism, to the theosophy,

just this constant search for stimulation of new imagery?

- You know this yourself.

That's what creative writers,

that's what poets, that's what songwriters do.

They're ruthless in the search of a theme, ruthless.

And they will rummage through anything

and extract anything and steal anything

in order to get an inspirational image

out of which will come a poem or a song

or a piece of creative writing.

[solemn music]

- "What they undertook to do they brought to pass.

"All things hang like a drop of dew

"upon a blade of grass."

So simple.

- [Bob] Yeats' new domestic stability sat uneasily

with the end of the Great War and the rise of Bolshevism.

At home, England's hesitation

in implementing hard-fought-for home rule

provoked the Irish War of Independence.

It was only 1919,

but with that remarkable prescience of his,

he could sense impending doom.

And with his store of magical metaphors and imagery,

a new, sharper, and darker genius began to emerge.

- "Turning and turning in the widening gyre

"The falcon cannot hear the falconer.

"Things fall apart, the center cannot hold.

"Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

"The blood dimmed tide is loosed.

"And everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned.

"The best lack all conviction

"While the worst are full of passionate intensity.

"Surely some revelation is at hand.

"Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

"The Second Coming!

"Hardly are those words out

"When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi troubles my sight.

"Somewhere in sands of the desert,

"A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

"A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun

"Is moving its slow thighs

"While all about it

"Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

"The darkness drops again,

"But now I know that 20 centuries of stony sleep

"Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle.

"And what rough beast,

"Its hour come round at last,

"Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"

- Creatively and emotionally,

W. B. Yeats had found a new maturity.

He gave up his old London bachelor pad

and tried to create a family home

in his mythical dream time, the West of Ireland.

It's pretty ludicrous that we're sort of sculling along

past this place because of course

it isn't normally like this.

This is a road and the river is down there,

and we're now crossing over normally a bridge.

But the countryside is in flood.

But the problem with the tower

was that it was regularly in flood.

Pound said this is Willie's phallic symbol in the country,

Ballyphallus or whatever it is he calls it

with the river flowing through the first floor.

And there it is.

And it was with some dismay

that he brought Georgie back here,

his wife, and raised his kids a lot of the time.

They thought it was freezing and,

you know, no electricity or anything.

But he loved it and you can see why.

It's got that austere beauty

that's so prevalent in the poetry.

What a place to live in.

- "Although I can see him still,

"The freckled man who goes to a gray place on a hill

"In gray Connemara clothes at dawn to cast his flies,

"It's long since I began to call up to the eyes

"This wise and simple man.

"All day I'd looked in the face

"What I had hoped 'twould be to write for my own race

"And the reality."

- Ireland was now in the middle

of a vicious and cruel war of independence

and Yeats was rightly outraged by the atrocities

committed around Coole and Ballylee by the warring parties.

He finally publishes his Easter Rebellion poetry

and nails his nationalism to the mast.

In 1921, in a speech to the Oxford Union,

he launched a blazing attack on the English in Ireland.

"I am a Victorian," he said,

"They knew the meaning

"of the terms truth, honor and justice, but you?

"You do not know the meaning of them."

W. B. Yeats is no longer ambivalent.

Once again, he wants to stand up and be counted.

He was a one man anti-emigration scheme.

He didn't want to leave,

like Joyce and Beckett and Wilde and Shaw.

He didn't want to go; he wanted to stay and change.

And it's kind of the boring point

I've been making about this whole film.

You can die

for a cause, but you can live for a reason.

It's only being alive that change happens,

and that was the route he took.

[solemn music]

The Anglo-Irish Treaty brought about a compromise

which Yeats supported, the Irish Free State.

He accepted a role as senator in this new government.

This was no token position, Ireland was now in a civil war.

Senators were being attacked, houses were being burned.

His own new home on Merrion Square in Dublin

was shot at and had armed guards.

He was going into the Senate

to ensure that the revolution that he had helped to engender

and the unique literary revolution

that he hoped would become the soul of the country,

which in fact it did,

should endure and should be ensured.

The new conservative Catholic free state,

despite their declarations,

did nothing for the rights of women

and sidelined important and vocal Protestants

into the Senate.

The plurality which the rebellion had promised

had been replaced with what, in effect,

was a Catholic clerical coup d'etat.

Unbelievably, a later government

even sent a telegram to the Pope desiring to,

"repose at the feet of your Holiness

"and our devotion to your August Person."

But nobody would muzzle W. B. Yeats.

He stood up against legislation

that he saw not only as unjust

but that might alienate Protestants

and rule out any chance of a united Ireland.

He wrote, "We must become a modern,

"tolerant, liberal nation."

He argued unsuccessfully

against the compulsory use of Irish language,

against censorship,

and the Catholic fear of evil literature

like James Joyce's Ulysses.

Some people see him still, though,

as the Englishman, don't they?

I mean, they're sort of dismissive of him.

- Well, yeah, I think he's seen as somebody

who's speaking for values that are alien

to what the increasingly pietistic Catholic,

you know, pledging allegiance to the Pope,

Free State governments want.

He believes that the artistic imagination

is part of the way a country empowers and liberates itself.

And that's what he's preaching in the Senate as well.

He talks on issues of art,

on issues of education, on issues of culture.

That's what he thinks an Upper House

in a modern government should be

and that's what he thinks is being denigrated

by the new highly Catholic, very bourgeois,

very conservative polity that the Free States become.

- [Bob] Famously, Yeats spoke out in vain

against the new state's plan to prohibit divorce.

He felt that it was grossly oppressive

to the Protestant minority and he said,

"I am proud to consider myself

"a typical man of that minority.

"We, against whom you have done this thing,

"are no petty people."

And he rightly claimed

that when the iceberg of Catholic control melted,

Ireland would become an increasingly tolerant country.

- "I walk through the long schoolroom questioning.

"A kind old nun in a white hood replies.

"The children learn to cipher and to sing,

"To study reading books and history,

"To cut and sew, be neat in everything

"In the best modern way.

"The children's eyes in momentary wonder stare upon

"a 60-year-old smiling public man."

- This film could actually be called

How The Prods Invented Catholic Ireland.

You know, so many of the great heroes of this story,

way, going way back, the great revolutionaries,

Emmett, Wolfe Tone,

never mind the literary figures, Douglas Hyde,

so critical to the realization of national self,

coming to sort of an apotheosis in Yeats' genius,

were of course Protestants.

And Yeats wasn't going to let that pass.

He was deeply proud of his caste and his background

and his people and their rallying call of Nationalism.

[somber music]

At every turn, Yeats constantly had to fight against

the narrow-minded worldview of this new young Ireland.

He chaired the Coinage Committee

but was attacked for choosing pagan designs

by an English Protestant.

Maud Gonne in particular hated them.

Less successfully, perhaps,

he also advised on the design

for the new robes for the Irish judiciary.

Unfortunately, this is what he thought

Irish judges should wear sitting in front of, sort of,

gougers and yahoos and corner boys, you know, drug dealing

and like beating up people when the pubs came out.

They would stand in the dock

in front of people dressed as this.

Are you serious?

Jeez, what do you got on there, Your Honor, you know.

And of course, every lawyer who saw this,

think they were gonna be judges

in the new independent country, were looking at this,

"You can fuck off if you think I'm ever gonna wear that."

[laughs] What?

[dramatic music]

Regardless of what some in Ireland

thought of W. B. Yeats' Irishness,

in 1923, Europe and the world

were about to recognize the greatness of his poetry.

The Nobel Prize then, as now, is huge.

For the country, it's such an honor

and it's taken as not just an imprimatur of genius

but that Ireland has been fully accepted now

into the great states of the world.

- The winning of the Nobel Prize

showed that there was a world recognition

of this poet and of the literature that he championed.

So, you know, we didn't have to feel ashamed of it

or feel in any way that it was second rate or whatever.

This had been recognized internationally

and we could embrace it without any feeling at all

that we were embracing the colonialists' language.

He was a more important ambassador for our state

then any statesman who was Taoiseach,

or as it would have been called,

President of the Executive Council.

- So did the new state fail him?

- Yes.

It was petty and he wasn't, ever.

[melancholy music]

- Witheringly and insultingly, the Catholic press

branded Willie and his like new ascendancy.

They dismissed him as a neopagan,

agnostic, Freemason pensioner.

They couldn't handle his utter belief

in the integrity of art

and the artistic, independent, revolutionary voice.

The Catholic Church, of course,

could never reconcile themselves to it.

They were spiteful.

They were full of hatred

because he represented everything that they were not,

openness, pluralism, modernity,

the individual, the thoughtful,

the less than infantile Irish that they insisted we were.

The patrimony of the Catholic Church.

Father, oh, father, come on, what father?

You're not my fucking father, you know.

So he resisted all that.

[solemn music]

Yeats' Abbey Theatre had first outraged

the narrow-minded patrons in 1907,

shocked at Synge's new realism

and his depiction of the language,

earthiness, and sexual frankness of the Irish

in Playboy Of The Western World.

In 1926, he was at it again

with Sean O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars,

a less than reverent take

on the holy rising of just 10 years earlier,

written by a man who, as a committed socialist

and revolutionary, had every right to his opinion.

The Plough and the Stars is important

because it totally fitted in to

where Yeats was at that time.

He was the public man who'd stepped up to the plate.

He'd been going on and on and on and on and on.

Really, now, people were fed up of this guy

going on about the Ireland that should be.

O'Casey's play dared question the Rising and its leaders

and Yeats would defend to the death

any artist's right to do precisely that.

This is viewed as a national disgrace.

Already these men have been set in stone on plinths.

Already, the GPO, 1916 are shibboleths.

You cannot, you cannot say anything against them.

They are utterly totemic and vital

to the national sense of self.

O'Casey is very hardcore about it.

He's saying, "What was all that for?

"That didn't really work.

"Who are we?

What is it we wanted to be?"

All hell breaks loose again.

And they couldn't handle that.

In the same way that Playboy had held up the mirror,

this newer Ireland had a mirror held up to itself

and they couldn't stand it.

But this time, he ain't going to debate anything.

This time, there's a real rage

because he genuinely, like Synge, thinks,

here's the new one, here's the new genius.

So he walks out on the stage,

and the cartoons will show you that stance here,

right here at this point, staring at them.

He shouts at them,

"You've disgraced yourselves again.

"You've disgraced yourselves again!"

It's not a headmaster chastising the class.

It's the disappointed leader.

[solemn music]

[birds chirp]

I'm not sure Willie had it in him anymore.

He was getting old and jaded.

Perhaps the grubby and pious Ireland he had found himself in

was not the romantic Ireland he'd dreamed of.

He retired from his role as senator

in 1928, his health failing.

He said he wished to live his remaining years

as a bee rather than a wasp.

Willie's version of Ireland was being smothered.

But one of his greatest weapons was outrage.

New stark, sexual poems,

sometimes written in a woman's voice, Crazy Jane,

always speaking the unspeakable.

- "A sudden blow.

"The great wings beating still above the staggering girl.

"Her thighs caressed by the dark webs.

"Her nape caught in his bill.

"He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

"How can those terrified vague fingers push

"The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?"

- "What lively lad most pleasured me

"Of all that with me lay?

"I answer that I gave my soul

"And loved in misery

"But had great pleasure with a lad

"That I loved bodily."

- "No ups and downs, my pretty.

"A mermaid, not a punk.

"A drunkard is a dead man.

"And all dead men are drunk."

[people laugh]

- It's great, isn't it?

It's like one of yours.

He started to reminisce about his class, his caste,

where he came from.

He had an affinity not just for the West of Ireland

but for the Protestant ascendancy, the big house.

He wasn't a natural democrat

and harbored a lifelong suspicion of the mob.

He believed in that ancient Homeric view of the aristocracy

to lead a country,

corresponding to his interest in Nietzsche

and the hierarchy of class.

He felt great families were wiser than governments.

He was a bit of a snob.

He wanted to be here and he got here

and he got here because he became the famous writer.

"Arise and bid me strike a match.

"And strike another till time catch.

"Should the conflagration climb,

"Run till all the sages know

"We the great gazebo built.

"They convicted us of guilt.

"Bid me strike a match and blow."

Part of his insistence that we

the great gazebo built, the great gazebo of Ireland,

It's your thing, it's our thing.

We cannot be dismissed, we are no petty people.

Of course he was right.

He predicted an unspecific

and terrifying dark era in Europe.

And his fear of communism led him

to a misguided dabble in fascism.

He wrote silly marching songs for Ireland's Blue Shirts,

a right wing movement of the early 1930s,

until he realized they were nothing more than a cabal

of the conservative Catholics he despised.

He felt impotent about how the world was going,

about where Ireland was going,

about where old age was taking him.

- "I ranted to the knave and fool

"But outgrew that school.

"Would transform the part

"Fit audience found, but cannot rule

"My fanatic heart.

"I sought my betters

"Though in each fine manners, liberal speech

"Turn hatred into sport.

"Nothing said or done can reach

"My fanatic heart.

"Out of Ireland have we come.

"Great hatred, little room

"Maimed us at the start.

"I carry from my mother's womb

"A fanatic heart."

That's another great line.

"We turn hatred into sport."

- "You think it horrible that lust and rage

"Should dance attendance upon my old age?

"They were not such a plague when I was young.

"What else have I to spur me into song?"

- Yeats had a family, a patient and loving wife,

but also a permanent gaggle of rackety female admirers.

Sex, like all acts of creativity,

happens first and most in the mind,

and sexual frisson had always been the source

of his writing energies.

Yet his impotence left him creatively barren.

But then, in London,

he heard about an unlikely medical procedure.

What is a Steinach operation?

- Oh, well, there are a whole lot of things

going on at this time, early 20th century,

now that they've discovered the idea of glands and hormones

and the idea of sexual glands and hormones

to, you know, restore people's sexual potency.

And the Steinach operation was one of the

less out there things

because it didn't actually involve

transplanting monkey glands.

It was actually a one-sided vasectomy.

And the idea was that by cutting off the seminal cells

and causing them to atrophy,

the other cells in the testes would proliferate

and recirculate in the bloodstream

and restore youth and vitality

to the man who had it done.

And this wasn't just about sexual potency,

it was also about productivity,

ability to, you know, in the case of Yeats, to write poetry,

but, you know, in all sorts of other ways to restore men

to full, you know, productive and creative vigor.

- [Bob] Did it work?

- No, well, it was said to work

but I think the placebo effect is a very strong thing.

- "How can I, that girl standing there,

"My attention fix on Roman or on Russian

"or on Spanish politics?

"Yet here's a traveled man that knows what he talks about

"And there's a politician

"That has both read and thought

"And maybe what they say is true

"Of war and war's alarms.

"But O that I were young again

"And held her in my arms."

- Part of the keynote of Yeats' last decade,

the 1930s, is frustration,

frustration on all sorts of levels.

There is, in a celebrated way, his sexual frustration,

his declining potency,

which he attempts to reverse with this operation,

his obsessive pursuit of

usually pretty willing women

to reignite some sort of sexual excitement in his life,

with Edith Heald, with Ethel Mannin,

even with Dorothy Wellesley, though she was a lesbian,

with Margot Ruddock.

And all this, I think, links very much

to a sense of mortality.

He's been seriously ill in the late '20s,

nearly died in the late '20s.

The wonderful Byzantium poems come out of his recovery

from a near death experience.

And I think when you read them in that light,

they make kind of special sense.

- "That is no country for old men.

"The young in one another's arms, birds in the trees.

"Those dying generations at their song.

"The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas.

"Fish, flesh, or fowl,

"Commend all summer long.

"Whatever is begotten, born, and dies

"Caught in that sensual music.

"All neglect.

"Monuments of unaging intellect."

[birds chirp]

- As Yeats' age increased

and all the vicissitudes that attend old age

dropped down on him,

he was very aware that life was becoming limiting.

And he wrote to his great friend Olivia Shakespear, he said,

"My age increases my change.

"My need for freedom grows."

And for Yeats in the later years,

freedom for him was represented by the Mediterranean.

"The encouraging presence of palm trees," he called it.

- [Reader] "An aged man is but a paltry thing.

"A tattered coat upon a stick,

"Unless soul clap its hands and sing,

"And louder sing

"For every tatter in its mortal dress."

- He needed to come to the south of France to winter here.

He'd spend summers in England with his various lady friends,

but also back at home in Rathfarnham in Dublin

with his wife and the kids,

though that was increasingly becoming a sort of

nurse and patient relationship.

Again, the more you read,

the more your admiration for his wife increases

and the more he becomes a sort of,

a contrary old fellow really.

- "A Drinking Song.

"Wine comes in at the mouth

"And love comes in at the eye.

"That's all we shall know for truth

"Before we grow old and die.

"I lift the glass to my mouth.

"I look at you, and I sigh.

That's it?

- That's it.

- Okay.

- [Bob] Not bad.

- I like those short ones. [laughs]

[delicate music]

- I think he was

willful, self-important,

self-obsessed, and involved to the nth.

And maybe, when you read about other great geniuses

or maybe that's what's required.

But sadly, with his children,

with his wife, with his many, many muses,

was he capable of love?

And that's the great irony.

The man who wrote

some of the greatest love poems

ever imagined in the English language

possibly actually never understood what it was.

- "A most astonishing thing.

"70 years have I lived.

"Hurrah for the flowers of spring

"For spring is here again.

"70 years have I lived.

"No ragged beggar man.

"70 years have I lived.

"70 years man and boy.

"And never have I danced for joy."

- Yeah, poor fucker.

[solemn music]

Willie's father had once brilliantly said

that their family tended to die slowly, like great empires.

W. B. Yeats died peacefully on the 28th of January, 1939,

surrounded by his wife and his female friends.

He understood he was going.

Almost the very, very last act

was to change one of the great final poems

constructed in the last couple of weeks

from the title His Convictions

to Under Ben Bulben.

Knowing what he was doing at the last moment,

Under Ben Bulben, he's writing himself into,

finally, the pantheon of great Irish heroes,

beyond the literary genius, the word genius,

no, under the pantheon of great Irish heroes.

Before he died, he instructed George

to bury him for a year here in Roquebrune

until the fuss died down back in Ireland

and then take him home to Sligo.

They took a plot of land up here for a brief period of time,

but war broke out,

so they couldn't bring him back to Sligo after a year.

Instead, they dug up bones

when the lease had run out on the ground

and put them down in that building there,

where the terracotta tiles are.

After the war,

Ireland wanted their great national poet home.

So the French returned some bones

that some people say aren't Yeats.

They're another fellow called Alfred Hollis

who had been buried beside him or some other geezer.

I mean, I love the joke.

I love the absurdity, as the Irish do,

but it is utterly meaningless.

The pilgrimages to Drumcliff,

that small little graveyard under Benbulben,

continue from all over the world, why?

Not because of what bones are there

but because of this great genius.

- "Cast your mind on other days

"That we in coming days may be

"Still the indomitable Irishry.

"Under bare Ben Bulben's head

"In Drumcliff churchyard, Yeats is laid

"An ancestor was rector there.

"Long years ago, a church stands near.

"By the road an ancient Cross.

"No marble, no conventional phrase

"On limestone quarried near the spot.

"By his command these words are cut.

"Cast a cold eye on life, on death.

"Horseman, pass by."

- In the end, Roy, how important is Yeats to Ireland?

- I think Yeats is of central importance

to the Irish sense of identity.

Partly because he so

brilliantly and aggressively flouted it in his own lifetime.

And you get the sense there that Yeats to the very end was,

as I think Stephen Gwynn said,

tearing down idols in the marketplace.

And I think that's a great thing to do.

Been far too many idols in the Irish marketplace.

Yeats devoted his life to

tearing them down or to questioning them.

And I think one of the very interesting things

is how he's impossible to get away from.

No matter where you look at Irish identity

and Irish cultural history from, he keeps coming up.

As George Moore said,

"Everything begins in Yeats and everything ends in Yeats."

[solemn music]

- [Bob] Ireland, like everywhere, acknowledges its heroes,

often the wrong ones,

its loudmouths and its literary geniuses.

But W. B., he's at the top of the heap.

He's in our DNA.

His childhood playground in Sligo

is now officially Yeats Country

for thousands of tourists every year.

Under Benbulben, I even found an illustrator

who created an entire book

just about his appalling love life.

This is a fantastic piece.

- That was one of the first ones I did.

- Yeats proposes to Maud the first time.

You can see all womanhood behind the window jeering.

- I know, it's all terribly symbolic.

- Maud Gonne has said yes! [laughs]

But you know what, it's true,

he wouldn't have written a note.

W. H. Auden said of Yeats,

"Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry."

But he was our mad old eejit,

a permanent adolescent and, above all,

an obsessive about love, life, about Ireland.

Auden also said he was silly, like us.

But Yeats wasn't silly when he said,

"My weapon is my verse,

"and it takes 50 years for a poet's weapons

"to influence the issue."

50 years after W. B. Died,

we elected a woman as president, a human rights lawyer.

The power and fear of the Catholic Church collapsed.

We finally started to see an Ireland

based on peace, pluralism, and respect.

Now that's Yeats country.

He is a great historical figure.

He's a great radical.

He's a great revolutionary.

He's a great nationalist.

He's a great patriot.

Did he succeed?

From that objective here in Sligo, as a kid,

did he win in the end what he set out to do?

Absolutely, did he transform the country?

Absolutely, did he transform literature?

Absolutely, and at the end of his life, he sort of said,

"What's it all about?"

And he looked back and in another

literally deathless poem,

he asked the question what then?

"His chosen comrades thought at school

"he must grow a famous man.

"He thought the same and lived by rule.

"All his twenties crammed with toil.

"'What then?' sang Plato's ghost, 'What then?'

"Everything he wrote was read.

"After certain years, he won sufficient money for his need.

"Friends that have been friends indeed.

"'What then?' sang Plato's ghost, 'What then?'

"All his happier dreams came true.

"A small old house, wife, daughter, son.

"Grounds where plum and cabbage grew.

"Poets and wits about him drew.

"'What then?' sang Plato's ghost, 'What then?'

"The work is done, grown old he thought,

"According to my boyish plan.

"Let the fools rage, I swerved in naught,

"Something to perfection brought.

"But louder sang that ghost, 'What then?'"

Well, the answer is Ireland.

♪ I walk beside you

♪ Through the world today

♪ While dreams and songs

♪ And lovers bless your way

♪ I look into your eyes

♪ And hold your hand

♪ I'll walk beside you

♪ Through the golden land