Maud Gonne and William Butler Yeats met in early 1889, and he first proposed to her - unsuccessfully - two years later. Some of Yeats' greatest poems chronicle his long obsession with her, among them A Woman Homer Sang, Reconciliation, and No Second Troy: What could have made her peaceful with a mind That nobleness made simple as a fire, With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind That is not natural in an age like this, Being high and solitary and most stern? Why, what could she have done, being what she is? Was there another Troy for her to burn? We tend to see Maud Gonne through his prism—a firebrand, a great beauty, above all a political fanatic who made him suffer like mad. These letters tell a more complex tale, since the majority are hers, most of Yeats' having been destroyed. What he portrayed as extremism instead becomes deep political involvement: her letters record an endless round of meetings, protests, and good works. In addition, the concern she again and again manifests for Yeats mitigates his cries of indifference; rather, Maud Gonne emerges as steady and heroic. Even as she was preparing to marry John MacBride, she took time out to console her longtime suitor in a characteristic run-on: "Friend of mine au revoir. I shall go over to Ireland in a couple of months, if you care to see me I shall be so glad & you will find I think that I am just the same woman you have always known, marriage won't change me I think at all...." The editors declare the original letter "very crumpled and creased as if carried in Yeats' pocket and taken out and read many times."
Author
William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and dramatist, and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years Yeats served as an Irish Senator for two terms. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival, and along with Lady Gregory and Edward Martyn founded the Abbey Theatre, serving as its chief during its early years. In 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for what the Nobel Committee described as "inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation." He was the first Irishman so honored. Yeats is generally considered one of the few writers who completed their greatest works after being awarded the Nobel Prize; such works include The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1929). Yeats was born and educated in Dublin but spent his childhood in County Sligo. He studied poetry in his youth, and from an early age was fascinated by both Irish legends and the occult. Those topics feature in the first phase of his work, which lasted roughly until the turn of the century. His earliest volume of verse was published in 1889, and those slow paced and lyrical poems display debts to Edmund Spenser and Percy Bysshe Shelley, as well as to the Pre-Raphaelite poets. From 1900, Yeats' poetry grew more physical and realistic. He largely renounced the transcendental beliefs of his youth, though he remained preoccupied with physical and spiritual masks, as well as with cyclical theories of life. —from Wikipedia
