William Butler Yeats, one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature, has cast his shadow over the history of both "modern poetry" and "modern Ireland" for so long that his pre-eminence is taken for granted, it emerged during an intense session on the life of the late poet on the second day of the Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF) here.
In the session titled "WB Yeats The Arch Poet," leading Irish historian Professor Roy Foster travelled beyond Yeats' "towering image as one of the 20th century's greatest poets to restore a real sense of his extraordinary life as Yeats himself experienced it -- what he saw, what he did, the passions and the petty squabbles that consumed him and his alchemical ability to transmute the events of his crowded and contradictory life into enduring art".
"Yeats never visited India but it is evident that right from the beginning, Hindu philosophy fascinated him. He deeply admired India and his devotion towards the works of Tagore is well known," said Foster, author of the first authorised biography of Yeats in over 50 years.Tagore first met Yeats during his third visit to Britain.
English painter William Rothenstein, overwhelmed by the rhetorical simplicity and philosophical gravity of Tagore's work, is said to have passed his poems to Yeats. And what next? The Irish poet reportedly burst into a torrent of praise on reading the manuscript: "If someone were to say he could improve this piece of writing, that person did not understand literature."
Later Yeats wrote the introduction to Tagore's "Gitanjali", which caught the imagination of the Western world.
"Yeats presented himself as a representative of his country's beliefs and that of his generation. This figure is so less understood even today. He is not just a poet but also a politician, a journalist a revolutionary and a theatre director," said Foster, a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA), the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL) and the Royal Historical Society FRHS). He has delivered dozens of lectures on Yeats in several countries.
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"He rediscovers Irish literature, always conscious of looking apart and different from the crowd. He moves from being an Irish Victorian to being an advanced modernist. He moves to a different world but throughout the process and even now he has always remained somebody who continues to make Irish culture richer," Foster said, as an attentive crowd listened patiently.
In favor of home rule, Yeats once compared Irish society to "a stagnant pond filled with junk, including the two old boots of Catholic bigotry and Protestant bigotry". Yeats believed that home rule could undam this pond, Foster said.
"Of course, this wasn't going to happen. The pond wouldn't be gently undammed by a constitutional act. It would be dynamited by a revolution," he said.
Yeats changed his public image from time to time so that he emerged, in 1922, as a prominent figure of a new nation, Foster said.
"Many of his early poems which seemed superficially simple are actually deep, deeper than most of us can ever comprehend. Yeats had an extraordinary ear for rhythm and as such, he believed that his own poetry should be chanted rather than recited."
"Yards and yards of scholarly research is yet to be written and decoded about the mysteries and the wide range of references and imageries that Yeats made in his work. As somebody growing up in a country facing a revolution, which would soon be free, in the new state of affairs, Yeats would soon emerge as a prominent figure, he always drew anger, strength and motivation from Ireland.
"His poems are so beautiful, in words and significance, because they came at a time when he was constantly changing his mind. He often had to rethink himself," Foster noted.
Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923 "for his always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation".
(Saket Suman is in Jaipur at the invitation of Teamwork arts. He can be contacted at saket.s@ians.in)
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