ウィリアム・バトラー・イエイツ (William Butler Yeats, 1865-1939)
アイルランドの詩人、劇作家。1865年6月13日、ダブリン (Dublin) に生まれる。イエイツの生涯にわたる文学活動の出発点は、John and Ellen O'Leary 編纂の Poems and Ballads of Young Ireland (1888) への寄稿、自ら編纂した Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888) と Irish Fairy Tales (1892) などを通してのアイルランドの民衆文学の伝統に対する目覚めであった。1901年に書かれた "What is 'Popular Poetry'?" というエッセイでは、国民文学への情熱を次のように吐露している。
“I thought one day—I can remember the very day when I thought it—'If somebody could make a style which would not be an English style and yet would be musical and full of colour, many others would catch fire from him, and we would have a really great school of ballad poetry in Ireland….' Then a little later on I thought, 'If they had something else to write about besides political opinions, if more of them would write about the beliefs of the people like Allingham, or about old legends like Ferguson, they would find it easier to get a style.” [W. B. Yeats, Essays and Introductions (London: Macmillan, 1961) 3-4]
1899年6月21日、Ballads and Poems (London, 1899) を出版した Clement Shorter 夫人に宛てた次の書簡でイエイツは、自分が理想とする文体について次のように述べている。
“I think a kind of half ballad, half lyric, is your best manner, though I may only like this best because I think it is the kind of poem I like myself—a ballad that gradually lifts, as 'The Wind on the Hills' lifts, from circumstantial to purely lyrical writing. If you work on you are quite sure to do finer and finer work just because you write in such a simple and circumstantial way. You build up from the ground instead of starting like most writers of verse with an insincere literary language which they can apply to anything. Try however, I think, to build about a lyric emotion. I only learnt that slowly and used to be content to tell stories.” [The Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. Allan Wade (New York, 1955) 322]
後期の主要な詩集として The Tower (1928), The Winding Stair (1929), Words for Music Perhaps and Other Poems (1932) などが挙げられるが、これらでイエイツは “a spare, colloquial lyricism” (The Oxford Companion to English Literature, 6th edition) を達成していると評されている。1923年、ノーベル文学賞受賞。 (M. Y.)
