11/28/2023 0 Comments Maud gonne william butler yeats![]() ![]() When Maud Gonne died in 1953, Iseult was not acknowledged as her mother's daughter in her will. Maud Gonne and her predecessor, Laura Armstrong, played. In 1920, she married Francis Stuart, a poet of Ulster descent. William Butler Yeats had love relationships with many women throughout his career however. Iseult attracted a number of other men, including Ezra Pound. Tagore left it to Yeats' discretion to decide the merit of the work, but Yeats did not feel sufficiently bilingual in French to judge them. Together, in France, they translated some of Tagore's The Gardener into French directly from the Bengali. She was tutored by Devabrata Mukerjea, with whom she also had an affair. Inspired by his poetry, she began to learn Bengali in 1914. Maud and Iseult Gonne were both the subjects of a number of poems written by Yeats. Yeats proposed to Maud Gonne in July 1916 and then Iseult soon after. Yeats, Maud Gonne's lifelong admirer, knew of Iseult's existence from 1898 and became a close part of her life. As an illegitimate daughter who lived in France, it was not until the divorce case between Maud Gonne and John MacBride took place in 1905-6 that her existence became known to the wider public. His logic may sometimes have been inconsistent his ideas may, at times, have been bizarre and some of his greatest poetry may have arisen from a misguided obsession but there is no doubting the power of his writing.Iseult Gonne was the daughter of the Irish nationalist, Maud Gonne. ![]() Should we be grateful that Maud Gonne still rejected Yeats even after their one night of consummation? If she hadn’t she would not have been his unobtainable Helen of Troy and we would not have that rich vein of mythology, complexity and longing which marks the greatness in his poetry. Through exposing these frailties and accepting that he has no more answers than his readers, but doing so with a mastery of structure and language of exquisite power, makes him to Irish literature what Shakespeare is to English literature. She famously won the devotion of one of the greatest poets of the age, William Butler Yeats. Easter 1916, possibly his most famous poem, and certainly one of his most oft quoted, begins with an acknowledgement that he was mistaken to scorn the leaders of the uprising and ends with his failure to explain the significance of the event beyond his belief that a ‘terrible beauty’ had been born. Maud Gonne, the legendary woman known as the Irish Joan of Arc. Yeats was not afraid to say publically when he was wrong or when he didn’t have an answer. It is this courage to look with unflinching honesty at the difficult, complex and, sometimes, very uncomfortable truth that characterises Yeats’ work. Over the years I have come back to the poem and I now realise that the shock is not the act of rape itself, but the suggestion that Leda may be complicit in it, that her ‘vague fingers’ may not want to push Zeus from her ‘loosening thighs’. The rest of the students were looking blankly at the poem so I struggled to explain what I thought was happening, although I was shocked by what I read: a woman was being violently raped by a swan. Well, I read it through twice and was immediately struck by, firstly, the power of the language and, secondly, the horror of what was happening. I remember Mrs Smallwood asking my class what we thought the poem was about. My first experience of Yeats was during my first English Literature A Level class: the very first text we were given was Leda and the Swan. In Broken Dreams, for instance, he becomes the ‘poet stubborn’ writing of Maud’s beauty when ‘age might have chilled his blood’. His poems are laden with self mockery, poking fun at his own pomposity. This view of Yeats, however, as a tortured artist blind to how ridiculous he appears to other people misses the greatness of Yeats’ work which arises because he is all too aware of how ludicrous he appears to others. These biographical details convince many casual readers that Yeats was clearly an ineffectual aesthete whose art arose from his personal failings. ![]() He then proposed to her daughter, and was again rejected. Yeats is sometimes, misguidedly, defined by his lifelong infatuation with a woman, Maud Gonne, who rejected his proposals of marriage on at least four occasions. ![]()
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