Yeats's Ghosts: The Secret Life of W.B. Yeats

By Brenda Maddox

Book Overview

William Butter Yeats, who some critics feel was the greatest English language poet of our century, led a life of many contradictions. He was Ireland's most revered writer and won the Nobel Prize for Literature. But in his private life, Yeats struggled with passionate, if unrequited, relationships with women and was haunted by the spirits of his ancestors. Renowned biographer Brenda Maddox examines the poet's life through the prism of his personal obsession with the supernatural and otherworldly. She considers for the first time the Automatic Script, the trancelike communication with supposed spirits that he and his much younger wife. Georgie, conducted during the early years of their marriage. Writing with edge, wit, and energy, she finds the essential clues to Yeats's life and work in his unusual relationships with women, most particularly Maude and Iseult Gonne, his wife Georgie, and his rarely discussed mother.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0060985046
• ISBN13: 9780060985042
• Release Date: September 2000
• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Length: 528 Pages
• Weight: 1.01 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 5.3" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

Cast a Cold Eye

Look, Brenda Maddox is a journalist not a scholar. She has little to say about the poems and her sources are nothing new. But she writes a lively prose with a deft eye for the human angle in describing the parade of remarkable women who passed through Yeats's later life. I don't think she's out to replace the more detailed biographies other reviewers mention so much as add color and detail to the standard portrait of the 'smiling public man.' The book's centerpiece is the early years of Yeats's marriage to his wife George, a cultivated woman twenty-seven years his junior who turned what looked to be a marriage of convenience into a source of great poetic inspiration. George began channeling spirits on their honeymoon which, over the next two years, revealed to Yeats an entire philosophy of history and the soul's fate after death while also dictating how an older, indifferent lover ought to treat a young new wife. Maddox leaves the question of the Script's authenticity open, pointing out on the one hand how well it suited George's purposes and on the other how sincerely she shared Yeats's occult beliefs. Halfway through the book though, after a short, out of place chapter on Yeats's mother, she leaves George behind to concentrate on the eccentricities of Yeats's later years. Yeats had a capacity for staying 'forever young' that led to some odd connections; he involved himself, especially after the Steinach operation, with a cast of dubious individuals who took him away from the unwanted responsibilities of home and family. I don't think Maddox is trying to pull Yeats off a pedestal--she clearly believes the poems he wrote in these years are great. She's also fair-minded in dealing with Yeats's Fascist sympathies, his late passion for eugenics and the bad rap he's gotten from feminists. But showing how much care and indulgence his work required from others, especially the women he chose to attend to his needs, reminds you that greatness is often a collaborative effort. Giving credit where credit is due for Yeats's late achievement, especially in the case of his long-suffering wife George, takes nothing away from his achievement. Just the opposite; I admired the poetry all the more knowing the personal hopes and (sometimes) blindnesses it grew out of. A fun, instructive read.

A Thoroughly Enjoyable Read

While Ms. Maddox's book is not scholarly, nor is it sensational; she walks a very careful line between the reverential respect for the Great Nobel Laureate, and an irreverent and open look at his private life, whether in the company of ghosts, or lovely young women... One imagines the author winking to her readers now and again, but the portrait she presents is very human, and quite simply fascinating. I couldn't put it down. And it was a marvelous way to reread the poetry, in context, as it were.