W.B. Yeats and the Muses

The women who influenced the poetry of W.B. Yeats

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Portrait of William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), Irish playwright and founder of the Abbey Theatre, with his wife during visit to the U.S. in the late 1920s.

Photo by Bettmann/CORBIS

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    Yeats was sixty-four when he wrote these lines and had but another decade to live. Amazingly, this decade, when he was impotent but still full of desire, gave rise to yet another phase in his relationship to the Muse. This time, however, rather than seeking inspiration in an outer manifestation of his creative impulse, Yeats came to the realization that the source of his art lay in the intersection of masculine and feminine energies contained within his own psyche. Yeats explained this as a recognition that his creativity arose from an engagement with “the woman within me.”  In one stunning poem and play after another, Yeats demonstrated how passionate his imagination became when expressing itself through the persona of a woman for whom sexual desire was the exact equivalent of spiritual longing. In effect, Yeats became his own Muse by assuming a woman’s sexual identity in the Crazy Jane poems and in plays like A Full Moon in March which insists on an ideal of love that survives the decrepitude of the body and death itself.
    Joseph Hassett’s W.B. Yeats and the Muses is a magnificent achievement.  What he demonstrates with clarity, discretion and profound insight is that Yeats is a consummate poet of love.  In exploring what is essentially the love life of a genius, Hassett’s intention has nothing to do with satisfying the prurient curiosity that seems to infect much discourse today within and without the academy. For this reader, the most impressive aspect of Hassett’s research lies in the fresh and elegantly nuanced interpretations he brings to a number of Yeats’ most significant works. Through his careful analysis of how the love and sexual passion of a great artist can infuse his creative life with inspiration and power, Hassett has made a major contribution not only to Yeats studies but also to a more enlightened understanding of how ordinary human beings can live more productively engaged and fulfilled lives.
    Yeats once proclaimed of his mystical pursuits that “an Adept must be always seeking ways of giving the purest substance of his soul to fill the emptiness of other souls.” Hassett’s record of how Yeats engaged himself with the various living Muses who inspired his work is a vivid depiction of how the creative process actually works.  His analysis of the art resulting from that effort is a living testimony to the ways in which Yeats maximized his talent by engaging himself openly, passionately and courageously with his deepest and most intimate aspirations and drives.  As such, Yeats’ life-affirming artistic achievement is at one with his religious convictions.  The incredible poetry and plays of Yeats are, like the mercies of sainthood, a gift to mankind.  Joseph Hassett deserves enormous credit for teaching us that lesson.  His study of how the sanctifying energy of love functions in the life of a great artist is itself a labor of love and a much-needed corrective to those who would dismiss the art of Yeats by dismissing the tortuous, sacrificial methods by which it was created. Like his subject, Hassett’s book is a work of great intellectual and human significance that will stand the test of time.

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