At the age of fifty, Yeats surprised his family by revealing that he remembered “little of childhood but its pain” (A 45). This confession may also surprise new readers of his early works, where his sorrowful, otherworldly longings sometimes seem more literary than real. But the young poet's pain was only too real. It arose from his keen perception of the fractured state both of the world around him and of his own inner being, a perception that made life appear incoherent and therefore empty of meaning and value. In response, he devoted his art to the never-ending effort to forge his fragmented self and surroundings into unity, with outcomes by turns triumphant and failed, admirable and problematic. This chapter outlines his early life and work through the end of the 1890s.

Childhood

Yeats's youthful anxieties originated in the tensions that troubled his family and in the social and political divides of late-nineteenth-century Irish life. In 1867, less than two years after the poet's birth in suburban Dublin on June 13, 1865, his father abandoned a promising law career and enrolled in a London art school with the intention of becoming a painter.