W B Yeats : Life and Work

A Life in Poetry

William Butler Yeats (13 Jun 1865 — 28 Jan 1939), b. Sandymount, Co. Dublin, Irish poet and one of the foremost figures of 20c English literature is one of only two poets born in the (then) UK, and the only one brought up in England, to win the Nobel Prize (Seamus Heaney having been born and grown up in the North of Ireland). Yeats’s poems are among the nation’s favourites — whether the ‘nation’ is Great Britain or Ireland — and range from love ballads and 19c folk-tale retellings through to symbolist, visionary, spiritual and political 20c poetry of sophistication and depth that continues to be explored/researched by academics the world over, 150+ years after his birth.

Yeats spent 20 of his first 30 years in London, half that time in the Utopian Arts-&-Crafts community at Bedford Park, the world’s first garden-suburb: he was just two when his father, County-Down-born John Butler Yeats,abandoned a Dublin law career in favour of portrat painting and brought, Willie, his mother, Susan Pollexfen Yeats, daughter of a Sligo merchant, and Willie’s sister Elizabeth, to London where the growing family moved frequently between houses, and between London, Dublin and Susan’s native Sligo, moving into Bedford Park’s Woodstock Rd in 1879 while Willie attended Godolphin (then a boys’ school) until age 16, then back to Dublin, returning to London when he was 20, and to 3 Blenheim Rd, Bedford Park, in 1888 where they remained until 1902.

The Yeats Siblings

Yeats’s three siblings all showed a talent for art and craft work, Susan becoming a leading embroiderer with Wm. Morris’s daughter May at the hive of industry that was Kelmscott House on the Thames nearby, and Elizabeth and Jack studying art at the Chiswick School of Art (the site that is now ArtsEd) with Elizabeth going on to become a painter and art-teacher, and founding, with Susan after the family left Bedford Park, Ireland’s craft industry in the Dun Emer Guild and Cuala Press Jack B Yeats, seven years younger than Willie and brought up primarily by Sligo grandparents until he joined the family in Blenheim Road at age fifteen, worked first as an illustrator before going on to develop the distinctive style that saw him win Ireland’s first Olympic Medal (in the arts and culture section) and go on to become Ireland’s greatest 20th-century artist.

The Early Poems

No-one who knows Yeat’s’ The Lake Isle of Innisfree, inspired as much by Chiswick Eyot in the Thames by Old Chiswick (a mile from Bedford Park) as by the Sligo island it so-vividly conjures, and written in his Blenheim Rd bedroom, can be unaware of the art produced from the urban-vs-rural, London-vs-West-of-Ireland, tension in the life Yeats’s artist father had given the family, in even this most pastoral of suburbs. (That poem’s publication in the National Observer by its poet-editor W.E. Henley who lived half-a-mile away was, like Yeats’s subsequent publication by his Blenheim Rd next-door-neighbour, Elkin Matthews’ publishing house The Bodley Head, part of the joy of living at the centre of Bedford Park’s literary milieu.)

No-one who knows Had I the Heavens’ Embroidered Cloths can have missed the importance – in WBY’s early poetic imagery – of Arts-&-Crafts in West London, and the work of William Morris, for whom WBY’s sister embroidered rich mediaeval tapestries and costumes at Kelmscott House three-quarters of a mile away on the Thames.

And anyone familiar with Yeats’s complex response to Ireland’s struggle for independence, voiced in poems such as Easter, 1916 will know of the impact of Bedford Park’s progressive thinking, and of the Yeatses’ visitors there, such as John O’Leary and Maud Gonne, not least in developing WBY’s political poetry and drama, with its complex view of all that was to happen in Ireland and, eventually, throughout the British Empire and the 20c world.

Land of Heart’s Desire

Sligo, in the West of Ireland, remained Susan Pollexfen Yeats’s Land of Heart’s Desire and became, through her talk of Irish stories and legends, and the freedom of family summers spent there, Willie’s dream of an alternative to the industrialised urban Victorian city beyond Bedford Park’s winding tree-lined avenues. Significantly his first staged play, entitled Land of Heart’s Desire, told the old story of a young woman lured away from the marital home to a magical place: he wrote the play in response both to dramas he’d seen enacted at the Bedford Park Club and to a request from Florence Farr whom he’d seen act in those dramas.

Thus the idea for an Irish National Theatre was born in Bedford Park in 1894, with the Irish Literary Society (still a significant force in London literary life today) already founded in the Yeats’s Blenheim Rd home in Dec1892.

The Capital as Cultural Hub

Yeats, and the Yeats family, with their unique collective contribution to poetry, drama, painting, arts and crafts, are only part of an ongoing cultural exchange between Ireland and London (and between the rest of the world and London): an exchange in which many Irish artists, writers, composers, actors, political thinkers (not to mention journalists, lawyers etc or the more-frequently cited construction workers, domestic servants, teachers and nurses) found employment and success in the capital. It would be difficult to imagine English literature without Farquhar, Congreve, Addison, Steele, Swift, Goldsmith, Sheridan, Wilde, Shaw, 19c painting without Maclise and Archer-Shee, music and song without Moore, Wallace, Balfe, Sullivan and Stanford, or British 19c politics without Burke, Wellington, O’Connell, or Parnell… all of them Irish.

But it was a cultural exchange which went both ways in allowing Irish artists and writers the support and media/publishing/theatre networks to develop cultural identity, evidenced not simply by the Yeats poems that Ireland took to heart, but by the plays (inspired by Bedford Park’s amateur dramatics) that led to Yeats’s controversial Abbey Theatre plays and the founding of the first state-subsidised theatre in Europe which continues to play a vital part both in bringing Irish drama to London (and the USA etc) as well as developing the Irish theatrical talent that dominates theatre today as it has done over the past two centuries.  

Getting to know Mr Yeats

Look out for lectures and literary walks on our events page. Discover Yeats’s poems on The Poetry Hour read by Seamus Heaney, Edna O’Brien and Fiona Shaw. Join London’s Irish Literary Society, explore Yeats’s Collected Poems. Read Roy Foster’s two-volume literary biography, The Apprentice Mage 1865-1914 and The Arch Poet 1915-1939. Or, to fully experience the West of Ireland where Yeats found inspiration for the poetry and plays he wrote in Bedford Park, visit Sligo’s magnificent Yeats Country, take the new (2023) Yeats Trail with its 14 great walks, stop off at Location#4, Lissadell House, home of his friends Eva and Constance Gore-Booth (later Countess Markiewicz), and check out the Yeats International Summer School now in its 64th year.

Your support

Thanks to an overwhelming public response we raised almost £200K covering initial infrastructure, professional costs, surveys, and planning application, the artwork itself including groundwork, foundations, plinth/base and engraving, delivery and installation, the creation of schools' Yeats/Bedford-Park workbooks, public lectures, an unveiling event and reception for guests and community groups, a promotional video and the development of our Discover Bedford Park with WB Yeats smartphone #visitorexperience.

Your donation now will pay for ongoing development at the artwork site (security, lighting and CCTV), help cover some three years' increased costs since we set our crowdfund targets in 2020, and help us celebrate Yeats's Nobel Centenary Year with our range of 2023 events, as well as both spreading the word worldwide about London's latest literary landmark/visitor-experience, and furthering our work with schools and community groups!

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Supporters

Thanks to all our many backers who include: the George Frampton Fund, Dukes Education, Embassy of Ireland (London), Embassy of Ireland (Washington), London Borough of Hounslow, London Borough of Ealing, The Josephine Hart Poetry Foundation (The Poetry Hour), Bedford Park Society, Bedford Park Festival, Chiswick Book Festival, Victoria Miro Gallery, Irish Literary Society, Saint Michael and All Angels Church (Bedford Park), London Buddhist Vihara, Chiswick Pier Trust, Lab 99 Web Design, The Post Room Café, Savills (Estate Agents), Theatre at the Tabard, Horton and Garton (Estate Agents), The Tabard, Innisfree Housing Association, WB Yeats Society of New York, WB Yeats Society of Savannah GA, Jimmy Page and Scarlett Sabet, Rowan Williams, Bob Geldof, Marie Heaney, Jeremy Vine, Carmen Callil, Anne-Marie Fyfe, Polly Devlin, Tom Paulin, Roy Foster, Joan McBreen, Edna and Michael Longley, Fergal Keane, Patrick Corcoran, Miles Parker, Tom Sleigh, Anthony Byrne, Frances O'Leary, Kate McAlister, Kevin McNally, Phyllis Logan, Shevaun Wilder, Ciarán Hinds, Martin and Joyce Enright, Marina Warner, Joseph Hassett, Ron Schuchard, Nessa O'Mahony, Belinda Ashton, plus countless poets, actors, academics, architects, Yeats fanatics, and lovers of all the arts, and literally hundreds of local Bedford Park residents and others local and international, all listed on our two crowdfund websites:

• Celebrate poet WB Yeats in Bedford Park
• Discover Bedford Park with poet WB Yeats