Yeats and Maud Gonne: (Auto)Biographical and Artistic Intersection

Abstract

Unlike many other heroines, Maud Gonne lives a separate life with her distinct personality in Yeats's works. Yeats's poems and letters and memoirs disclose a relationship of temperamental and ideological differences between two a relationship of unrequited love and out-of-body experience, sexual longing and unfulfillment complicated with dynamics of their spiritual interests as well as psychosexual anxieties. It was a politically charged and mystically coded relationship. This essay attempts to present different stages of Yeats's poetic presentation of Maud Gonne, her own autobiographical description of her relationship to poet, and way his frustrated love complemented his poetic philosophy. It shows how idea of Maud Gonne served as a direct inspiration for Yeats's poetic creativity and how a sense of devotion, defeat, and melancholy pervades his work, allowing him to recreate an idealized past. This essay attempts to give a picture not only of Yeats's lyrical portrait of her but also his struggle to understand all she stood for. ********** The intertwined careers of Yeats and Maud Gonne and their artistic and biographical relationship have been a subject of much critical investigation. The relationship, emotional or otherwise, of any great lyric poet with women treated as lovers, muses, companions, and fellow-workers has always been deservedly so. Moreover, as Richard Ellmann points out, unlike heroines of Swinburne, Rossetti, and Morris, who Yeats thought did not have any separate lives of their own, Maud Gonne does indeed live a separate life with her distinct personality in his works. (1) His poems and letters and memoirs disclose a relationship of temperamental and ideological differences between two--a relationship of unrequited love and out-of-body experience, sexual longing and unfulfillment complicated with dynamics of their spiritual interests as well as psychosexual anxieties. It was a politically charged and mystically coded relationship, fraught with fear, anger, disgust, underside of an idealising romantic passion. (2) The present essay does not claim to be a real investigation of a problem involved in that highly complex relationship. Instead, it attempts to present different stages of Yeats's poetic presentation of Maud Gonne, her own autobiographical description of her relationship to poet, and way his frustrated love complemented his poetic philosophy. Talking about Mask and Image in The Trembling of Veil: Four Years, 1887-1891, Yeats in a romantic spirit declares, We begin to live when we have conceived of life as tragedy. (3) Accordingly, he began to live from January 30/February 1, 1889, day he met Maud Gonne (1865-1953) first time through introduction of John O'Leary. (4) As he discovered Irish mythology through O'Leary who was his personification of Romantic Ireland, (5) so too he discovered through him woman who was to change his life for ever. He refers to fine spring morning of that fateful day as time from when the troubling of my life began. (6) In a retrospective analysis he says that from his youth he was looking forward to an experience in love that would, no matter how painful, shape him as a poet. So be must have dreamed of an exciting and unusual woman to love, just as he must have disliked ordinary, conventional marriage defined and bound by its traditional domesticities. (7) Accordingly, he fell in love with a woman who also had come to see marriage, at least by 1905, as destructive for many women, (8) would never become his wife despite his repeated proposals and would still continue to inspire an intense passion and provide him with images and themes for his poetry. It was Maud Gonne, a tall, beautiful, well-to-do and independent-minded Dublin actress and a violent Irish nationalist, who was to fit Yeats's desire and change his whole attitude to life and poetry. …