‘It would appear now that some people do appreciate my work’: What WB Yeats told The Irish Times in 1923 about his Nobel win

Nobel Prize for Literature may be awarded to Mr WB Yeats

The Irish Times, Saturday, November 3rd, 1923

The Stockholm Tidningin states that it is expected that the Nobel Prize for Literature will be awarded this year to Mr WB Yeats.

The German author Herr Thomas Mann is also named as a possible winner.

Interviewed by an Irish Times representative last night, Mr Yeats expressed surprise. His interrogator, he said, was the first person to acquaint him with the tidings – “but, well,” he added, with a smile, “this must be a fable. I had no idea that I ever could be worthy of such a distinction; although it would appear now that some people do appreciate my work.”

Questioned as to which of his publications he considered was his masterpiece, Mr Yeats said: “First, let me confess that my mind dwelt so much on the Nobel Prize that I could not tell how the selection of best literature is made, nor could I give the name of any person who takes part in the judging. I do know, however, that the German, Herr Mann, is not one to be despised.

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“Now, about my best work – it is hard to say, for I change my views every other day!”

Discussing former winners, Mr Yeats recalled an incident which, he laughingly remarked, “connected my name, but not my bank book, with the Nobel Prize”.

Some years ago, it appears, the Nobel Prize was awarded to the Indian poet Tagore. Immediately a rumour was broadcast that Mr Yeats, who had written an introduction to the Indian‘s poems, published in England, had won the coveted prize for Tagore, and quite a number of letters were received by the Irish poet from Indians, who wanted him to secure prizes for them also.

“That,” said Mr Yeats with a chuckle, “was the nearest approach in my career to winning the Nobel Prize.”

Mr Yeats knew the Nobel Prize to be of very great value. Tagore, he pointed out, had been able to endow a school, and to this day he paid out three times as much money on the pupils as he received from them.

Mr Yeats, whose latest work was The Trembling of the Veil, a book of autobiography published last year, is about to publish a book on philosophy, entitled A Vision.

The poet’s crown

The Irish Times, Thursday, November 15th, 1923

The Nobel Prize for Literature has been awarded to Mr WB Yeats. This prize is the highest honour that can be won by a man of letters, and Irishmen throughout the world will rejoice that the genius of one of their countrymen has been crowned by its gift.

The Nobel prize-winners number some of the greatest names in the literary history of our age. Last year the prize was awarded to Benavente, the great Spaniard, and the august company to which Mr Yeats has been elected includes Anatole France, Gerhart Hauptmann, Knut Hamsun and Romain Rolland. The only other English-speaking writers in the list are Rudyard Kipling and Rabindranath Tagore.

We congratulate Mr Yeats on the world tribute which has been paid to his art. His success is a national, as well as a personal, triumph, and it constitutes a fitting sequel to the recent admission of the Free State to membership of the League of Nations; for, although Mr Yeats writes in the English language, he is purely an Irish poet. The folklore of Ireland was his sole inspiration; the spirit of the Gael is the warp and woof of his thought.

He suggests in an interview which we print in another column that the Nobel Prize has been awarded to him not as one of the greatest living lyric poets but as the founder of the Abbey Theatre and the school of Anglo-Irish literature which sprang from it. Doubtless, the committee recognised the value of the work which was done by Mr Yeats for Irish drama. Without him there would have been no Abbey Theatre; without the Abbey Theatre there would have been no Synge.

We prefer to believe, however, that the choice of Mr Yeats as the most worthy candidate for the Nobel Prize is a more personal compliment to his lyric art. The music of his poetry has carried the folk genius of Ireland to the ends of the earth. The purity and subtlety of his lyric style have lifted his work far above the welter of vers libre and pretentious rhyming in which the souls of Europe’s modern singers have been poured forth to a jaded world. If he never had written anything but Inisfree he still would rank among mankind’s most highly gifted artists.

Idealism is the chief criterion by which candidates for the Nobel Prize are judged, and Mr Yeats is the idealist par excellence. Is he the last of the tribe? Is romantic Ireland really dead and gone? Mr Yeats seems to think that the folk phase in our literature is passing, if not past, and that the psychologist will replace the poet in the hierarchy of Irish art. Political changes always react on the literary evolution of a people, and, now that men’s minds are turning from the soft dreams of the past to the harsh realities of the present, probably a new school will begin to emerge from the momentary darkness of our artistic life.

Be that as it may, Mr Yeats’s poetry will remain a national asset, and it will be a sad day for Ireland when she ceases to glory in his song.

Irish poet honoured – Our special interview – The new phase in literature

The Irish Times, Thursday, November 15th, 1923

Stockholm, Wednesday – The Nobel Prize for Literature, valued at approximately £7,500, has been awarded to Mr WB Yeats. A telephone message from the Irish Times office was the first intimation which Mr Yeats received of the high tribute which had been paid to his work. He had known nothing whatever about it, and was not even aware of the value of the prize.

“If it is a small one,” he said to Mrs Yeats, “we will spend it and be rich; if it is a large one we will invest it and be substantial.”

In the course of an interview with our representative, Mr Yeats said that he assumed that the Nobel committee had chosen him principally on account of his work in the Irish drama. He had founded the Abbey Theatre, which gave Synge and Lady Gregory to the world, and he felt that the prize had been awarded rather to the Anglo-Irish literary movement than to himself.

That movement, he said, had attained a remarkable standard of excellence in the one-act play, and, contrary to public opinion, Mr Yeats believed, Lady Gregory was one of its greatest exponents. The Jackdaw and The Jail Gate, he said, were perfect of their kind, and, coming to more modern times, he asserted that Mr Lennox Robinson’s latest play, Crabbed Youth and Age, was a masterpiece.

This led him to speculate on the future of the Irish literary movement, and he developed some very interesting ideas. The romantic school, of which he himself was at once the prophet and the master, he believes to be passing.

“What would replace it?” “Probably the psychologists,” said Mr Yeats.

Of the new school, he thought that Mr Lennox Robinson was the precursor. Crabbed Youth and Age showed the invasion of psychology into romanticism, and he believed that the political change from striving to achievement would result in the eclipse of the dreamer, and the emergence of a new school of playwrights, more or less on the model of Ibsen in his Doll’s House period.

“The difference‚” said Mr Yeats, “between the old and the new is the difference between Dr Douglas Hyde and Mr Kevin O’Higgins. The making of good citizens is the aim of today.”

Amongst the heralds of the new school he also mentioned Mr James Joyce. “I am not a judge of the novel form‚” he said, “but in Joyce’s work there is an intensity which is the essential of a great art. Even in a bad writer, or in a bad painter,” he continued, “one always can detect the signs of something new. Joyce is a very great writer, and something is there striving to be born.”

[ ‘Europe’s welcome to the Free State’: The story of WB Yeats’s Nobel victory ]

At all times Mr Yeats is a delightful talker, but he is most delightful when talking about his lyrics. He refused to admit that they had been responsible for his election to the Nobel Prize but did not deny that they really were his life’s work. “Irish folk,” he confessed, “is the only thing about which I ever shall care very deeply,” and he went on to assert that everything he had written had had as its inspiration the furtherance of the movement to which he had dedicated his life.

In this connection he revealed an interesting feature of his work. Whenever he wrote a new poem, he said, he thought of it not only in relation to the literary movement but also to his work as a whole. Sometimes he feels that his work needs a little more colour here, or a little more there; then he writes a poem to perfect the balance.

For that reason, doubtless, Mr Yeats never says that one of his lyrics is better than another. He thinks of his work as an artistic entity, which one suspects is not yet quite complete.

The aim of all his work, he said, had been to perfect what he describes as the syntax of passionate speech. One ought to be able to declaim a lyric, he said, in a market square so that the people who heard it hardly would realise that they were not listening to prose. Wordsworth had broken new ground by his discovery of the vocabulary of such speech. Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson and himself – he perhaps more consciously than the other two, for he was more of a philosopher – had striven to find its syntax.

“Have you found it?” asked our representative. ‘’Only within the last twelve or fourteen years,” came the reply.

One could have spoken for hours with Mr Yeats, but a poet who is at once a Nobel Prize-winner and a Senator, albeit the most courteous and obliging of men, has many claims upon his time, and, besides, “last trams” have a cynical disregard for European fame.

Nobel Prize – Mr WB Yeats leaves for Stockholm

The Irish Times, Thursday, December 6th, 1923

Harwich, Wednesday – Mr WB Yeats, the Irish poet, left Harwich tonight for Stockholm, where he is to receive the Nobel Prize. A number of academic and social gatherings have been arranged in his honour.

Senator Yeats in Stockholm – Receives Nobel Prize

Weekly Irish Times, Saturday, December 15th, 1923

The award of the Nobel Prizes at Stockholm on Monday, on the anniversary of the death of the donor, was the occasion of the customary public ceremony, at which the king and several members of the royal family were present.

As the 1922-23 prizes for medicine were both awarded on this occasion, and were both divided into two shares, the total number of recipients this year is seven, instead of four, and of these four were present today – namely Dr Pregl, of Graz (Chemistry); Dr Hill, of London, and Dr Meyerhof, of Kiel (Medicine, 1922); and Mr WB Yeats (Literature).

The other recipients are Dr Millikan, of Washington (Physics); Dr Banting and Dr Macleod, of Canada (Medicine, 1923).

After the prizes had been presented by the king a banquet was held, under the presidency of Prince Wilhelm.