Bob Geldof on WB Yeats: A Fanatic Heart

This programme contains some strong language

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.

In my classroom...

..a priest began to read the poetry of WB Yeats.

Now, here, I recognised immediately, was the country I belonged to.

Here was Ireland articulated -

a modern, plural, open, generous country.

..Of dusty wind and after

Thunder of feet, tumult of images

Their purpose in the labyrinth of the wind.

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.

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 WB 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.

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 re-moulded 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.

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 enrols 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."

To escape this bohemian penury,

Willie Yeats's mother would regularly take her children

to her family, the Pollexfens, a prosperous trading dynasty

based in Sligo town in the north-west of Ireland.

Susan Yeats bringing her brood to Sligo

is the birthplace of WB's dream-like 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's 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's Memory Harbour,

which was Willie's favourite painting of his,

and many people's favourite 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 would be other kids here.

And it doesn't matter, you know, what age you are 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 wrath

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 witchlike harbinger of death the Irish call 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 chest

For he comes, the human child

To the waters and the wild

With a faery, hand in hand

From a world more full of weeping

Than he can understand.

He did say a wonderful thing.

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

-Mmm.

That's no small sentence.

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's brilliance

is that he is one of the first people to see

this will have to be rescued

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

And 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 centre

"of all I do, think and write."

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

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.

Whilst Sligo ignited his mystical, spiritual side,

in London, with its vast, swirling stew,

the centre 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, fuelled 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.

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 WB arrived in 1887

full of fairy tales and Celtic mysticism,

London would have loved him.

Even though he had 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 very cheap house, as Willie called it,

spelling it C-HEEP.

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 to 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."

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 recognising 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 WB

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 realisation that occurred in this room

or in his bedroom upstairs,

WB 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 fires 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,

cos he is this marginalised, 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're 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 grey

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 classicises 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...

She gets this endless sort of stuff. Do...

I mean, put yourself in her position.

Does she go, "I just went to his house and I sat in a bloody chair,"

you know? "Had a cup of tea."

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

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

-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 are old and tired

"and grey 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.

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 WB 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, and...

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

"Maud and I will end up here. This is perfect for us."

It is terminally romantic.

Unfortunately for Willie,

Maud was more in love with revolution than romance.

Like many a young Irishman before and since,

WB 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, 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.

The kind of poetry WB Yeats was dreaming into life

would need to be written with distance from afar,

on literally the concrete empiricism

of the grey pavements of the capital of the world.

The literary revival he was at the centre of

was fuelled by an unspecific yearning,

inventing a new idealised version of the self, of the people,

of Ireland.

The Celtic Twilight,

or Cultic Toilette, as James Joyce, the young punk would later call it,

was triggered by a memory -

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

-Keep your eyes open for fairies, will you, 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 and you can't.

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

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

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."

While I stand on roadway

Or on the pavements grey

I hear it in the deep heart's core.

The choice of words is...

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.

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, JB, brings him along one day

to meet fellow intellectuals in the Contemporary Club.

And 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 is 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 fella."

And he brings him along.

He instructs him, he takes him under his wing.

O'Leary had been tried for treason in the year WB was born

and he helped found the Irish Republican Brotherhood,

a secret organisation

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 am a fellow traveller here, you can count on me.

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

By the 1890s, WB'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,

WB brought Maud to see his friend

and mystic writer and artist AE 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 AE 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 you 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-grey 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,

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, she started bouncing up on the beds.

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's life.

She and her home were probably more important to Yeats's 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's 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 laboured 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 unbeliev...

This is one of... 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.

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 wraths or fairy forts that they had left behind.

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.

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 realises 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 theatre 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...

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."

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 going to make a noise.

Even if you were an amateur like Gregory,

you were going to 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,

ie those who were quite prepared to pick up the gun and go.

The war drums were beating louder.

WB 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 Kathleen 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 that 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 wrote in his diary...

"The effect of Kathleen 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?

Yeats's nationalism

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, WB's path was cultural revolution,

the pen not the sword.

What ultimately distanced WB Yeats from the revolutionary cause

was a broken heart.

Maud Gonne, in the cauldron of nationalist fervour,

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...

It had big propaganda value.

Two icons of Republican resistance marry each other

and are sworn to bring down the British Empire

and are photographed in publicity shots 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 publicised...

-The Bonnie and Clyde of Republicanism?

-In a way.

The squalid and long drawn out and publicised 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 behaviour

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,

nationalist men close ranks around MacBride

and in many ways exorcise 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?

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 is 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 have 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.

WB 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.

Things fall apart

The centre cannot hold...

But I am old and you are young...

I carry from my mother's womb a fanatic heart...

That is no country for old men

The young in one another's arms...

Changed utterly

A terrible beauty is born.

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 bigger on foot

Hurrah for revolution and cannon come again!

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

# 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.

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.

WB 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 traditional 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.

-I

-am

-saying that.

They're certainly a revolutionary elite.

-And they're certainly bent on...

-So 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.

O but we talked at large before the sixteen 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 Wolf 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 Moore. 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, TS Eliot."

These are his own editions of his own works.

So I have to wear the gloves made famous

on endless history programmes

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

you know, almost sacred texts.

And why not?

I have met them at close of day

Coming with vivid faces

From counter or desk among grey eighteenth-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 cack-handedness 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.

TEARFULLY: Brilliant.

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.

-Yeah.

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 to 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.

The 18 months after the Rising

saw WB 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.

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, "OK."

Within days, under pressure of the horoscope deadline,

the happy couple arrive at a London register office.

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

"She is not good-looking but is comely.

"Her nose is too big for good looks, her colour 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.

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.

-Yeah.

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, decide 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, cos...

-I would, wouldn't I?!

..you're 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 it want 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.

What they undertook to do they brought to pass

All things hang like a drop of dew upon a blade of grass.

So simple.

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 centre 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 twenty 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, WB 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 are sort of scurrying along

past this place, cos of course it isn't normally like this.

This is a road and the river is down there

and we are 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.

It was freezing,

and...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 grey place on a hill

In grey 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, honour and justice, but you?

"You do not know the meaning of them."

WB 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.

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 WB 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 is 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.

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