At a recent meeting organised by UCD at Newman House, Senator Susan O’Keeffe, chair of Yeats150, said that during this year of the celebrating of WB Yeats, the poet should also be challenged. Yeats is open to challenge in many areas. So here goes.

Yeats saw himself as a dramatic artist who was not bound by the normal social mores. He demonstrated this in several ways in his long collaboration with Lady Gregory. He claimed authorship of Cathleen Ni Houlihan in 1902 and later, in 1910, betrayed Gregory by allowing unfair criticism from Edmund Gosse to go unchallenged, lest he jeopardise his chance of getting a Civil List pension.

He told his sisters that education was wasted on women as it made them into “loud chatterers.” He refused to ever acknowledge his sister Lolly’s artistic endeavours. She described an encounter between Willie and Maire Ni Shuiblaigh, the Abbey actress, writing: “His manner was sneery & offensive and Maire would discuss nothing. Willie kept on telling her that she was a ‘beginner’ & had much to learn & so on, & at the same time spoke the whole time of Mr Fay & Miss Algood & the others as if they were finished actors & actresses . . . I know what harm he would have done here if he could have baulked us in our work.

“He does not understand practical life. Since he was a small boy he was always too easily led to make a good leader himself & instead of learning to control a naturally disagreeable temper, of late years, he has indulged himself in fits of temper. I have indeed heard Miss Horniman speak of his bad temper as if it were a feather in his cap. Just as stupid people would speak of a child, showing self-will by kicking and screaming for what he wanted”.

Willie was a sectarian snob believing that Catholics were of a lesser breed. When Maud Gonne converted to Catholicism, he protested that it was “a denial of God”, urging her to take up again the solitary, haughty life, which made her seem like one of the Golden Gods. “Do not betray the truth. Is it the priest who will lead the people? No no.” Maud replied, “You hate the Catholic Church with the hate of the Daemon”.

George Russell, who worked closely with Willie on the Abbey, wrote to Lady Gregory: “It is very unfortunate that Yeats should arouse such savage enmities among people who long ago had every inclination to serve him. He would wreck anything he is concerned with by his utter incompetence to understand the feelings of or character of anybody he is dealing with. He has no talent for anything but writing and literature and literary discussions. If I were an autocrat I would give him £20,000 a year, if at the end he had written 200 lines of poetry – if he opened his mind or mouth on business or tried to run any society, I would have him locked up as dangerous to public peace.”

Willie believed in elites. He held that aristocracy was the best form of government and flirted with fascism. Sir Ian Hamilton, a famous soldier and cousin of Lady Gregory wrote of an encounter he had with Hitler: “During my two-hours talk last year with Adolf Hitler, as I listened to his eager, nervy voice running up and down the gamut of the emotional scales – laughter, sorrow, pity – the thought kept on rising the back of my head like a question mark, ‘wherever have I heard someone speak like this – who could it have been?’ Then suddenly, as he spoke of his nightingales, the mirror of memory flashed and there I was, listening to Yeats”.

Of course hatred was a great theme of Yeats’s life and poetry. One of the most notorious expressions of it came in his canonical poem Easter 1916, when he wrote those hateful words [of a loser] about Maud Gonne’s husband Major John MacBride, words more appropriate to Yeats himself. Yeatsian scholars have quoted Maud’s rejection and exegesis of that poem but continue to miss out or ignore the real reason she wrote on November 8, 1916, “No I don’t like your poem, it isn’t worthy of you & above all it isn’t worthy of the subject . . .”

Towards the middle of the letter she gives the real reason for her rejection of this great poem: “As for my husband, he has entered Eternity by the great door of sacrifice which Christ opened & has therefore atoned for all so that in praying for him I can also ask for his prayers & ‘A terrible beauty is born’.”

This was as close as Maud could be expected to come in acknowledging that she had sinned against her husband. Yeatsian scholars feel obliged to continue to follow their icon in condemnation of a brave and noble man, who when the opportunity came to walk away from Jacob’s Factory in 1916, before the surrender took effect, advised those who wished to do so to walk away, telling them, “Liberty is a priceless thing and any one of you that sees the chance, take it. I’d do so myself, but my liberty days are over. Good luck, boys”.

Despite all the above difficulties, WB Yeats is our national poet. Arthur Griffith who knew Yeats as well as any other man wrote in 1900: “Yeats is Irish literature, and Irish belief, and Irish faith, hope and aspiration. In every properly governed and sensible community the people would spend half their time in making, reading and comprehending poetry . . . Mr Yeats sings of what he knows and sings more beautifully than ever an Irish poet sang before”.