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- "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.

[solemn music]

In my classroom,

a priest began to read
the poetry of W. B. Yeats.

Now, here, I
recognized immediately,

was the country I belonged to.

Here was Ireland articulated,

a modern, plural,
open, generous country.

"Blast of dusty wind and after,

"thunder of feet,
tumult of images,

"their purpose in the
labyrinth of the wind."

[hand thumps]

[laughs] 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.

[somber music]

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 W. B. 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.

[somber music]

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
remolded 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."

[solemn music]

- 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 enrolls 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."

[delicate music]

To escape this bohemian penury,

Willie Yeats' mother would
regularly take her children

to her family, the Pollexfens,
a prosperous trading dynasty

based in Sligo town in
the northwest of Ireland.

Susan Yeats bringing
her brood to Sligo

is the birthplace of W. B.'s
dreamlike 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' 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' Memory Harbour,

which was Willie's
favorite painting of his,

and many people's
favorite 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'd be other kids here.

And it doesn't matter, you
know, what age you're 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, wraith,

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 witch-like
harbinger of death

the Irish called 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 chests.

"For he comes, the human child,

"to the waters and the wild,

"with a fairy, hand in hand,

"from a world more
full of weeping

"than he can understand."

He did say a wonderful thing.

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

That's no small sentence.

[somber music]

- [Bob] 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' brilliance

is that he is one of
the first people to see

this will have to be rescued

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

And it's the 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 center

"of all I do, think, and write."

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

and 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."

[lively music]

- Whilst Sligo ignited his
mystical, spiritual side,

in London, with its
vast, swirling stew,

the center 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, fueled
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.

[lively music]

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
W. B. arrived in 1887

full of fairy tales
and Celtic mysticism,

London would have loved him.

Even though he'd
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 cheap,
a very cheap house,

as Willie called it,
spelling it C-H-E-E-P.

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 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."

[lively music]

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 recognizing

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 W. B.

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 realization
that occurred in this room

or in his bedroom upstairs,

W. B. 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 fire 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,

because he is this
marginalized, 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 are 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 gray

"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 classicizes 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. [laughs]

- She gets this
endless sort of stuff.

I mean, put yourself
in her position.

What do you think, does she
go, "I just went to his house

"and I sat in a bloody
chair, you know?

"Had a cup of tea, you know."

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

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

- 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're old and tired

"and gray 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.

[somber music]

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 W. B. 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.

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

Maud and I will end up here,

this is perfect
for us, you know.

It is terminally romantic.

[solemn music]

Unfortunately for Willie,

Maud was more in love with
revolution than romance.

[lively music]

Like many a young
Irishman before and since,

W. B. 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, or 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.

[somber music]

The kind of poetry W. B.
Yeats was dreaming into life

would need to be written
with distance from afar,

on literally the
concrete empiricism

of the gray pavements of
the capital of the world.

The literary revival
he was at the center of

was fueled by an
unspecific yearning,

inventing a new idealized
version of the self,

of a people, of Ireland.

The Celtic Twilight,
or Cultic Toilette,

as James Joyce, the young
punk tyro would later call it,

was triggered by a memory,

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

Keep your eye open for
fairies, will you, Smithy?

- [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, you can't.

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

- [W. B.] "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."

- [W. B.] "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."

- [W. B.] "While
I stand on roadway

"Or on the pavements gray

"I hear it in the
deep heart's core."

- The choice of
words 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.

[melancholy music]

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, J. B.,
brings him along one day

to meet fellow intellectuals
in the Contemporary Club.

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's 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 fellow."

And he brings him along.

He instructs him, he
takes him under his wing.

[melancholy music]

O'Leary had been
tried for treason

in the year W. B. was born

and he helped found the
Irish Republican Brotherhood,

a secret organization
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'm a fellow traveler
here, you can count on me.

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

[solemn music]

By the 1890s, W. B.'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,

W. B. brought Maud
to see his friend

and mystic writer and
artist, A. E. 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 A. E. 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 your 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-gray
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,
[lively music]

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 and she started
bouncing up on the beds,

and 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' life.

She and her home were probably
more important to Yeats' 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' 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 labored and worked
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,

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."

[somber music]

- 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 wraiths

or fairy forts that
they'd left behind.

And 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.

[lively music]

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 realizes

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 theater,
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 thing,

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.

But I 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 gonna make a noise.

Even if you were an
amateur like Gregory,

you were gonna 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,

i.e. those who
were quite prepared

to pick up the gun and go.

[dramatic music]

The war drums were
beating louder.

W. B. 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 Cathleen 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
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 writes in his diary,

"The effect of Cathleen
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?"

- [Bob] Yeats' nationalism
[tense music]

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,

W. B.'s path was
cultural revolution,

the pen, not the sword.

What ultimately
distanced W. B. Yeats

from the revolutionary
cause was a broken heart.

Maud Gonne, in the cauldron
of nationalist fervor,

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 a,

it had big propagandist values.

Two icons of Republican
resistance marry each other

and are sworn to bring
down the British Empire

and are photographed
in a publicity shot

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 publicized.

- Is it the Bonnie and
Clyde of Republicanism?

- In a way.

The squalid and long drawn out

and publicized 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 behavior

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,

nationalists, men close
ranks around MacBride

and in many ways
exorcize 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?"

- [Bob] 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's 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've 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."

- [Bob] W. B. 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.

- [Reader] "Things fall apart.

"The center cannot hold."

- [Reader] "But I am
old and you are young."

- [Reader] "I carry from my
mother's womb a fanatic heart."

- [Reader] "That is no
country for old men.

"The young in one
another's arms."

- [Reader] "Changed utterly.

"A terrible beauty is born."

[solemn music]

- 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 beggar on foot.

"Hurrah for revolution
and cannon come again!

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

[explosion booms]

♪ 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.

[somber music]

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.

W. B. 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 tradition 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.

- [Bob] I know but
I am saying it.

- They're certainly a
revolutionary elite.

And they're certainly bent on.

- So what, 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.

[somber music]

- "O but we talked at large
before the 16 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 Wolfe 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 Moores.

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, T. S. Eliot."

These are his own
editions of his own works.

So I have to wear the gloves

that made famous on
endless history programs.

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

almost sacred texts.

And why not?

- "I have met them
at close of day

"Coming with vivid faces

"From counter or desk among
gray 18th-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
cackhandedness 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."

Brilliant.

[foreboding music]

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.

- 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 into 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.

- [Bob] The 18 months
after the Rising

saw W. B. 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.
[somber music]

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 okay.

Within days, under pressure
of the horoscope deadline,

the happy couple arrive at
a London register office.

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

"She is not good-looking
but is comely.

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

[solemn music]

- 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.

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, decided

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 because.

- Yeah, I would say
that, wouldn't I?

- 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
want it 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.

[solemn music]

- "What they undertook to
do they brought to pass.

"All things hang
like a drop of dew

"upon a blade of grass."

So simple.

- [Bob] 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 center 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 20
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,

W. B. 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're sort of sculling along

past this place
because of course

it isn't normally like this.

This is a road and the
river is down there,

and we're 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.

They thought it
was freezing and,

you know, 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 gray place on a hill

"In gray 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, honor
and justice, but you?

"You do not know the
meaning of them."

W. B. 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.

[solemn music]

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 W. B. 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's 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.

- [Bob] 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.

"A kind old nun in a
white hood replies.

"The children learn
to cipher and to sing,

"To study reading
books and history,

"To cut and sew, be
neat in everything

"In the best modern way.

"The children's eyes in
momentary wonder stare upon

"a 60-year-old
smiling public man."

- This film could
actually be called

How The Prods Invented
Catholic Ireland.

You know, so many of the
great heroes of this story,

way, going way back, the
great revolutionaries,

Emmett, Wolfe Tone,

never mind the literary
figures, Douglas Hyde,

so critical to the
realization of national self,

coming to sort of an
apotheosis in Yeats' genius,

were of course Protestants.

And Yeats wasn't going
to let that pass.

He was deeply proud of his
caste and his background

and his people and their
rallying call of Nationalism.

[somber music]

At every turn, Yeats
constantly had to fight against

the narrow-minded worldview
of this new young Ireland.

He chaired the Coinage Committee

but was attacked for
choosing pagan designs

by an English Protestant.

Maud Gonne in
particular hated them.

Less successfully, perhaps,

he also advised on the design

for the new robes for
the Irish judiciary.

Unfortunately, this
is what he thought

Irish judges should wear
sitting in front of, sort of,

gougers and yahoos and corner
boys, you know, drug dealing

and like beating up people
when the pubs came out.

They would stand in the dock

in front of people
dressed as this.

Are you serious?

Jeez, what do you got on
there, Your Honor, you know.

And of course, every
lawyer who saw this,

think they were gonna be judges

in the new independent
country, were looking at this,

"You can fuck off if you think
I'm ever gonna wear that."

[laughs] What?

[dramatic music]

Regardless of what
some in Ireland

thought of W. B.
Yeats' Irishness,

in 1923, Europe and the world

were about to recognize the
greatness of his poetry.

The Nobel Prize then,
as now, is huge.

For the country,
it's such an honor

and it's taken as not just
an imprimatur of genius

but that Ireland has
been fully accepted now

into the great
states of the world.

- The winning of the Nobel Prize

showed that there was
a world recognition

of this poet and of the
literature that he championed.

So, you know, we didn't
have to feel ashamed of it

or feel in any way that it
was second rate or whatever.

This had been recognized
internationally

and we could embrace it
without any feeling at all

that we were embracing the
colonialists' language.

He was a more important
ambassador for our state

then any statesman
who was Taoiseach,

or as it would have been called,

President of the
Executive Council.

- So did the new state fail him?

- Yes.

It was petty and
he wasn't, ever.

[melancholy music]

- Witheringly and insultingly,
the Catholic press

branded Willie and his
like new ascendancy.

They dismissed
him as a neopagan,

agnostic, Freemason pensioner.

They couldn't handle
his utter belief

in the integrity of art

and the artistic, independent,
revolutionary voice.

The Catholic Church, of course,

could never reconcile
themselves to it.

They were spiteful.

They were full of hatred

because he represented
everything that they were not,

openness, pluralism, modernity,

the individual, the thoughtful,

the less than infantile Irish
that they insisted we were.

The patrimony of
the Catholic Church.

Father, oh, father,
come on, what father?

You're not my fucking
father, you know.

So he resisted all that.

[solemn music]

Yeats' Abbey Theatre
had first outraged

the narrow-minded
patrons in 1907,

shocked at Synge's new realism

and his depiction
of the language,

earthiness, and sexual
frankness of the Irish

in Playboy Of The Western World.

In 1926, he was at it again

with Sean O'Casey's The
Plough and the Stars,

a less than reverent take

on the holy rising of
just 10 years earlier,

written by a man who,
as a committed socialist

and revolutionary, had
every right to his opinion.

The Plough and the
Stars is important

because it totally fitted in to

where Yeats was at that time.

He was the public man who'd
stepped up to the plate.

He'd been going on and
on and on and on and on.

Really, now, people
were fed up of this guy

going on about the
Ireland that should be.

O'Casey's play dared question
the Rising and its leaders

and Yeats would
defend to the death

any artist's right
to do precisely that.

This is viewed as a
national disgrace.

Already these men have been
set in stone on plinths.

Already, the GPO,
1916 are shibboleths.

You cannot, you cannot
say anything against them.

They are utterly
totemic and vital

to the national sense of self.

O'Casey is very
hardcore about it.

He's saying, "What
was all that for?

"That didn't really work.

"Who are we?

What is it we wanted to be?"

All hell breaks loose again.

And they couldn't handle that.

In the same way that Playboy
had held up the mirror,

this newer Ireland had a
mirror held up to itself

and they couldn't stand it.

But this time, he ain't
going to debate anything.

This time, there's a real rage

because he genuinely,
like Synge, thinks,

here's the new one,
here's the new genius.

So he walks out on the stage,

and the cartoons will
show you that stance here,

right here at this
point, staring at them.

He shouts at them,

"You've disgraced
yourselves again.

"You've disgraced
yourselves again!"

It's not a headmaster
chastising the class.

It's the disappointed leader.

[solemn music]

[birds chirp]

I'm not sure Willie
had it in him anymore.

He was getting old and jaded.

Perhaps the grubby and pious
Ireland he had found himself in

was not the romantic
Ireland he'd dreamed of.

He retired from
his role as senator

in 1928, his health failing.

He said he wished to
live his remaining years

as a bee rather than a wasp.

Willie's version of Ireland
was being smothered.

But one of his greatest
weapons was outrage.

New stark, sexual poems,

sometimes written in a
woman's voice, Crazy Jane,

always speaking the unspeakable.

- "A sudden blow.

"The great wings beating still
above the staggering girl.

"Her thighs caressed
by the dark webs.

"Her nape caught in his bill.

"He holds her helpless
breast upon his breast.

"How can those terrified
vague fingers push

"The feathered glory from
her loosening thighs?"

- "What lively lad
most pleasured me

"Of all that with me lay?

"I answer that I gave my soul

"And loved in misery

"But had great
pleasure with a lad

"That I loved bodily."

- "No ups and downs, my pretty.

"A mermaid, not a punk.

"A drunkard is a dead man.

"And all dead men are drunk."

[people laugh]

- It's great, isn't it?

It's like one of yours.

He started to reminisce
about his class, his caste,

where he came from.

He had an affinity not just
for the West of Ireland

but for the Protestant
ascendancy, the big house.

He wasn't a natural democrat

and harbored a lifelong
suspicion of the mob.

He believed in that ancient
Homeric view of the aristocracy

to lead a country,

corresponding to his
interest in Nietzsche

and the hierarchy of class.

He felt great families were
wiser than governments.

He was a bit of a snob.

He wanted to be
here and he got here

and he got here because he
became the famous writer.

"Arise and bid me
strike a match.

"And strike another
till time catch.

"Should the conflagration climb,

"Run till all the sages know

"We the great gazebo built.

"They convicted us of guilt.

"Bid me strike a
match and blow."

Part of his insistence that we

the great gazebo built, the
great gazebo of Ireland,

It's your thing, it's our thing.

We cannot be dismissed,
we are no petty people.

Of course he was right.

He predicted an unspecific

and terrifying
dark era in Europe.

And his fear of
communism led him

to a misguided
dabble in fascism.

He wrote silly marching songs
for Ireland's Blue Shirts,

a right wing movement
of the early 1930s,

until he realized they were
nothing more than a cabal

of the conservative
Catholics he despised.

He felt impotent about
how the world was going,

about where Ireland was going,

about where old
age was taking him.

- "I ranted to
the knave and fool

"But outgrew that school.

"Would transform the part

"Fit audience found,
but cannot rule

"My fanatic heart.

"I sought my betters

"Though in each fine
manners, liberal speech

"Turn hatred into sport.

"Nothing said or done can reach

"My fanatic heart.

"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."

That's another great line.

"We turn hatred into sport."

- "You think it horrible
that lust and rage

"Should dance attendance
upon my old age?

"They were not such a
plague when I was young.

"What else have I to
spur me into song?"

- Yeats had a family, a
patient and loving wife,

but also a permanent gaggle
of rackety female admirers.

Sex, like all acts
of creativity,

happens first and
most in the mind,

and sexual frisson had
always been the source

of his writing energies.

Yet his impotence left
him creatively barren.

But then, in London,

he heard about an unlikely
medical procedure.

What is a Steinach operation?

- Oh, well, there are
a whole lot of things

going on at this time,
early 20th century,

now that they've discovered
the idea of glands and hormones

and the idea of sexual
glands and hormones

to, you know, restore
people's sexual potency.

And the Steinach
operation was one of the

less out there things

because it didn't
actually involve

transplanting monkey glands.

It was actually a
one-sided vasectomy.

And the idea was that by
cutting off the seminal cells

and causing them to atrophy,

the other cells in the
testes would proliferate

and recirculate
in the bloodstream

and restore youth and vitality

to the man who had it done.

And this wasn't just
about sexual potency,

it was also about productivity,

ability to, you know, in the
case of Yeats, to write poetry,

but, you know, in all sorts
of other ways to restore men

to full, you know, productive
and creative vigor.

- [Bob] Did it work?

- No, well, it was said to work

but I think the placebo
effect is a very strong thing.

- "How can I, that
girl standing there,

"My attention fix on
Roman or on Russian

"or on Spanish politics?

"Yet here's a traveled man
that knows what he talks about

"And there's a politician

"That has both read and thought

"And maybe what they say is true

"Of war and war's alarms.

"But O that I were young again

"And held her in my arms."

- Part of the keynote
of Yeats' last decade,

the 1930s, is frustration,

frustration on all
sorts of levels.

There is, in a celebrated
way, his sexual frustration,

his declining potency,

which he attempts to
reverse with this operation,

his obsessive pursuit of

usually pretty willing women

to reignite some sort of
sexual excitement in his life,

with Edith Heald,
with Ethel Mannin,

even with Dorothy Wellesley,
though she was a lesbian,

with Margot Ruddock.

And all this, I
think, links very much

to a sense of mortality.

He's been seriously
ill in the late '20s,

nearly died in the late '20s.

The wonderful Byzantium poems
come out of his recovery

from a near death experience.

And I think when you
read them in that light,

they make kind of special sense.

- "That is no
country for old men.

"The young in one another's
arms, birds in the trees.

"Those dying generations
at their song.

"The salmon-falls, the
mackerel-crowded seas.

"Fish, flesh, or fowl,

"Commend all summer long.

"Whatever is begotten,
born, and dies

"Caught in that sensual music.

"All neglect.

"Monuments of
unaging intellect."

[birds chirp]

- As Yeats' age increased

and all the vicissitudes
that attend old age

dropped down on him,

he was very aware that
life was becoming limiting.

And he wrote to his great friend
Olivia Shakespear, he said,

"My age increases my change.

"My need for freedom grows."

And for Yeats in
the later years,

freedom for him was represented
by the Mediterranean.

"The encouraging presence of
palm trees," he called it.

- [Reader] "An aged man
is but a paltry thing.

"A tattered coat upon a stick,

"Unless soul clap
its hands and sing,

"And louder sing

"For every tatter in
its mortal dress."

- He needed to come to the
south of France to winter here.

He'd spend summers in England
with his various lady friends,

but also back at home
in Rathfarnham in Dublin

with his wife and the kids,

though that was increasingly
becoming a sort of

nurse and patient relationship.

Again, the more you read,

the more your admiration
for his wife increases

and the more he
becomes a sort of,

a contrary old fellow really.

- "A Drinking Song.

"Wine comes in at the mouth

"And love comes in at the eye.

"That's all we
shall know for truth

"Before we grow old and die.

"I lift the glass to my mouth.

"I look at you, and I sigh.

That's it?

- That's it.

- Okay.

- [Bob] Not bad.

- I like those
short ones. [laughs]

[delicate music]

- I think he was

willful, self-important,

self-obsessed, and
involved to the nth.

And maybe, when you read
about other great geniuses

or maybe that's what's required.

But sadly, with his children,

with his wife, with
his many, many muses,

was he capable of love?

And that's the great irony.

The man who wrote

some of the greatest love poems

ever imagined in
the English language

possibly actually never
understood what it was.

- "A most astonishing thing.

"70 years have I lived.

"Hurrah for the
flowers of spring

"For spring is here again.

"70 years have I lived.

"No ragged beggar man.

"70 years have I lived.

"70 years man and boy.

"And never have I
danced for joy."

- Yeah, poor fucker.

[solemn music]

Willie's father had
once brilliantly said

that their family tended to
die slowly, like great empires.

W. B. Yeats died peacefully
on the 28th of January, 1939,

surrounded by his wife
and his female friends.

He understood he was going.

Almost the very, very last act

was to change one of
the great final poems

constructed in the
last couple of weeks

from the title His Convictions

to Under Ben Bulben.

Knowing what he was
doing at the last moment,

Under Ben Bulben, he's
writing himself into,

finally, the pantheon
of great Irish heroes,

beyond the literary
genius, the word genius,

no, under the pantheon
of great Irish heroes.

Before he died, he
instructed George

to bury him for a year
here in Roquebrune

until the fuss died
down back in Ireland

and then take him home to Sligo.

They took a plot of land up
here for a brief period of time,

but war broke out,

so they couldn't bring him
back to Sligo after a year.

Instead, they dug up bones

when the lease had
run out on the ground

and put them down in
that building there,

where the terracotta tiles are.

After the war,

Ireland wanted their
great national poet home.

So the French
returned some bones

that some people
say aren't Yeats.

They're another fellow
called Alfred Hollis

who had been buried beside
him or some other geezer.

I mean, I love the joke.

I love the absurdity,
as the Irish do,

but it is utterly meaningless.

The pilgrimages to Drumcliff,

that small little
graveyard under Benbulben,

continue from all
over the world, why?

Not because of what
bones are there

but because of
this great genius.

- "Cast your mind on other days

"That we in coming days may be

"Still the indomitable Irishry.

"Under bare Ben Bulben's head

"In Drumcliff
churchyard, Yeats is laid

"An ancestor was rector there.

"Long years ago, a
church stands near.

"By the road an ancient Cross.

"No marble, no
conventional phrase

"On limestone quarried
near the spot.

"By his command
these words are cut.

"Cast a cold eye
on life, on death.

"Horseman, pass by."

- In the end, Roy, how
important is Yeats to Ireland?

- I think Yeats is
of central importance

to the Irish sense of identity.

Partly because he so

brilliantly and aggressively
flouted it in his own lifetime.

And you get the sense there
that Yeats to the very end was,

as I think Stephen Gwynn said,

tearing down idols
in the marketplace.

And I think that's
a great thing to do.

Been far too many idols
in the Irish marketplace.

Yeats devoted his life to

tearing them down or
to questioning them.

And I think one of the
very interesting things

is how he's impossible
to get away from.

No matter where you
look at Irish identity

and Irish cultural history
from, he keeps coming up.

As George Moore said,

"Everything begins in Yeats
and everything ends in Yeats."

[solemn music]

- [Bob] Ireland,
like everywhere,
acknowledges its heroes,

often the wrong ones,

its loudmouths and
its literary geniuses.

But W. B., he's at
the top of the heap.

He's in our DNA.

His childhood
playground in Sligo

is now officially Yeats Country

for thousands of
tourists every year.

Under Benbulben, I even
found an illustrator

who created an entire book

just about his
appalling love life.

This is a fantastic piece.

- That was one of
the first ones I did.

- Yeats proposes to
Maud the first time.

You can see all womanhood
behind the window jeering.

- I know, it's all
terribly symbolic.

- Maud Gonne has
said yes! [laughs]

But you know what, it's true,

he wouldn't have written a note.

W. H. Auden said of Yeats,

"Mad Ireland hurt
you into poetry."

But he was our mad old eejit,

a permanent adolescent
and, above all,

an obsessive about love,
life, about Ireland.

Auden also said he
was silly, like us.

But Yeats wasn't
silly when he said,

"My weapon is my verse,

"and it takes 50 years
for a poet's weapons

"to influence the issue."

50 years after W. B. Died,

we elected a woman as president,
a human rights lawyer.

The power and fear of the
Catholic Church collapsed.

We finally started
to see an Ireland

based on peace,
pluralism, and respect.

Now that's Yeats country.

He is a great historical figure.

He's a great radical.

He's a great revolutionary.

He's a great nationalist.

He's a great patriot.

Did he succeed?

From that objective
here in Sligo, as a kid,

did he win in the end
what he set out to do?

Absolutely, did he
transform the country?

Absolutely, did he
transform literature?

Absolutely, and at the end
of his life, he sort of said,

"What's it all about?"

And he looked back
and in another

literally deathless poem,

he asked the question what then?

"His chosen comrades
thought at school

"he must grow a famous man.

"He thought the same
and lived by rule.

"All his twenties
crammed with toil.

"'What then?' sang Plato's
ghost, 'What then?'

"Everything he wrote was read.

"After certain years, he won
sufficient money for his need.

"Friends that have
been friends indeed.

"'What then?' sang Plato's
ghost, 'What then?'

"All his happier
dreams came true.

"A small old house,
wife, daughter, son.

"Grounds where plum
and cabbage grew.

"Poets and wits about him drew.

"'What then?' sang Plato's
ghost, 'What then?'

"The work is done,
grown old he thought,

"According to my boyish plan.

"Let the fools rage,
I swerved in naught,

"Something to
perfection brought.

"But louder sang that
ghost, 'What then?'"

Well, the answer is Ireland.

♪ I walk beside you

♪ Through the world today

♪ While dreams and songs

♪ And lovers bless your way

♪ I look into your eyes

♪ And hold your hand

♪ I'll walk beside you

♪ Through the golden land