Release date: Feb. 7, 2003
Contact: Deb Hammacher, Associate Director, University Media Relations,
at 404-727-0644 or dhammac@emory.edu

Emory Acquires Important Yeats/Gonne Letters

Emory University has augmented its world-class Irish literary archives with the correspondence of Irish actress and activist Maud Gonne and the poet and dramatist William Butler Yeats. Among the 370 letters of Gonne to Yeats and 30 of his to her are several that have never been published.

"Yeats' unrequited love for Maud Gonne over 40 years generated many of his greatest poems, and thus the 400 surviving letters that delineate their personal relationship in the midst of Irish politics and culture from 1893 to 1938 make their correspondence among the most important in 20th-century Ireland," says Ronald Schuchard, Goodrich C. White Professor of English and Irish literary scholar.

One of the greatest English-language poets of the 20th century, Yeats shaped both literature and history. Much of the power of Yeats' writing derived from his study of classical tradition and Irish folklore. For Yeats, Gonne was a figure of mythical significance, embodying Leda, Helen of Troy and Cathleen Ni Houlihan (the title character of Yeats' 1902 play), according to Schuchard.

The correspondence shows that when Yeats met Gonne in 1889, his life changed forever. Actress, activist, and a person of striking stature and beauty, Gonne was a firebrand who stirred him to strong feelings of Irish nationalism. She also was to share in the spiritual and occult interests that were the wellsprings of his art. Two years after their meeting, when Yeats first proposed marriage, Gonne refused. That refusal may have impelled Yeats to even greater work, and among the unpublished letters in the collection is a long letter from Gonne to Yeats explaining her reasons why the two could never marry.

Not many of Yeats' letters to Gonne survive due to her frequent moves, her fear of implicating Yeats as an Irish Nationalist, and the damage caused when her Dublin house was raided by the Free State Police in 1922.

For scholars researching the currents of thought, literary developments and political motivations of this time of ferment, these letters are an important addition to the Emory's existing holdings of Yeats and his circle. Beyond their illumination of the lives and work of the two individual correspondents, the letters can serve as a kind of window on how literary productions drove social change and conversely, how the politics of Yeats's Ireland influenced the writers.

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