Emergency Abridgment Services Present.....
This is rough. I thought I would write a quick summary about Yeats, but in reading about his life, I became surprisingly disillusioned. To summarize:
Yeats was born in Ireland in 1865. He went to art school to study painting and became a poet. He did not believe in God, but believed that art and beauty could fix everything (aestheticism). Maud Gonne was Yeats' first and deepest love interest. When she married another man, he used her image in his poetry as a tragic figure.
When Gonne was later widowed, she again turned Yeats' proposal down, so he proposed to her daughter, who also declined. He married another woman that same year and had two children with her. When she began to utter strange phrases in her sleep (akin to the 'automatic writing' she claimed to have) Yeats thought that his personal occult aesthetic system of philosophy was confirmed.
Yeats' work was considered to be some of the best around the turn of the century. His poems and plays were filled with references to Irish folklore, the occult and “half-forgotten things”. He believed that the arts, more than politics, should lead man “to a harmonious ordering of chaos”.
It seems his personal beliefs were a fresh combination of strange and orthodox ideas. Yeats thought the key was to find one's “antiself” so as to produce art from the synthesis of opposing natures (?). He drew from Jewish and Christian mystic books, and Buddhism, to predict that the 2000 year cycle of life would soon be coming complete with the revelation of an “opposite” to Christ who would be “slouching towards Bethlehem to be born”. (This line was used as a take off for Robert Bork's 1996 look at modern liberalism; Slouching Towards Gomorah)
After he died in 1929, and was buried in France, this ironic line from one of his poems was engraved on his tombstone, "Cast a cold eye / On life, on death. / Horseman, pass by!”, as if The Horseman (death) had not already made his pickup.
What QUALITIES OF GOD are evident in William Butler Yeats?
Back to the basics: God loves HUMANITY. God loves those who SEEK, ASK and KNOCK.
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