In the autumn of 1923, William Butler Yeats received a telephone call at his home in Dublin informing him that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He was fifty-eight years old, and his first response, characteristically, was to worry about money. He had spent decades in more or less genteel financial difficulty, funding his theatrical ambitions, his occult investigations, and his increasingly elaborate domestic life on the proceeds of poetry and lecturing, and the prize money, he told a friend, would make an enormous difference. What he did not say, and perhaps did not need to, was that the Nobel represented something more than financial relief. It was confirmation, at the highest level the literary world could offer, that the strange and solitary path he had taken, away from the fashionable realism of his contemporaries and toward symbolism, mysticism, and a poetry rooted in Irish myth and the movements of his own restless inner life, had been the right path all along. The boy who had grown up between Sligo and London, belonging fully to neither, had written his way into a tradition that now had to find room for him at its center.
Irish poet, dramatist, and prose writer William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) is considered to this day one of the greatest English-language poets of the twentieth century, a judgment that his Nobel Prize in Literature of 1923 confirmed and that the century since has only deepened. His work moved from the dreamy Celtic twilight of his early lyrics through the harder, more politically urgent voice that emerged after the Easter Rising of 1916, arriving finally at the visionary late poetry of The Tower and The Winding Stair, where aging, history, and the occult systems he had spent a lifetime assembling converged into a body of verse of extraordinary power and density. Across that entire arc, the personal and the mythological remained inseparable, and the voice that emerged was unlike anything else in the language: ceremonious, passionate, and haunted by a beauty it could never quite possess.
To explore that voice requires a poet as much as a scholar, someone who has absorbed Yeats from the inside and can speak about his craft with the authority of a fellow practitioner. Paul Muldoon, author of numerous books of poetry, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Moy Sand and Gravel, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a teacher of creative writing at Princeton University and formerly professor of poetry at Oxford, is precisely that guide. His own poetry, rooted in Irish experience and shaped by a comparable formal ambition, gives him access to Yeats that purely academic engagement cannot replicate.
In the conversation that follows, Muldoon shares his insight into the life and work of a poet who transformed the English lyric tradition from within, reflecting on the craft, the obsessions, and the enduring mystery of a writer who believed, with absolute seriousness, that poetry could change the world, and whose work continues, with quiet insistence, to make the case.
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