Something there is

What is love?

The evidence of the poets is as conflicting as it is voluminous. Even if one set aside poems about the love of Country, poems about the love of Nature, poems about the love of God, one is left with a mountain as the poems on any other subject seem but a molehill. There are almost as many definitions of love as there are poets, because most poets have something to say on the subject. In a high proportion of cases, what they have to say is said better, more freshly, than anything on any other subject. Poets, like any other actors in a human comedy, speak most piercingly when they speak most personally.

Great poets love passionately. The greatest poets love but once. William Butler Yeats (1865—1939) is one of the greatest poets of English-speaking world. It seems that he, too, loved but one woman all his life.

Yeats was born in Dublin. His father abandoned the career of a barrister to become an artist. He was unconcerned about money and inspired his son to become a poet in spite of the inevitable financial insecurity. Yeats began writing his first verses in his late teens. He studied Irish history and old Gaelic legends with enthusiasm and commenced to write his own verse, dreamy and idealistic to begin with, yet moving towards a deeper awareness of Ireland's spiritual and literature heritage. In January 1889, he met Maud Gonne.

She was 23, beautiful and determined. She was already deeply committed to Irish nationalism. Yeats fell passionately in love with her and came to view her as a symbol of Ireland. However, in 1891 she refused Yeats's offer of marriage. A powerful sense of the poet's wounded pride pervades in his poems of that time. He never recovered from that wound, actually. His love for Maud Gonne is always there, though a somewhat calmer devotion. In 1903, Maud married another man, a radical freedom fighter. In 1916, her husband was executed after the Dublin Easter Rising. Yeats proposed to Maud Gonne for the second time. She refused him again. Yeats's unrequited love for Maud Gonne is underlying frustration in many of his poems. Could the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927 help relieve that frustration? Who knows?