Yeats's gift of book to 'first lover' goes under hammer

A BOOK inscribed by WB Yeats to a woman he would later call his “first lover and long-time friend” is to be sold at auction in New York later this week.

The volume of poems by William Blake was given to the novelist and patron of the arts, Olivia Shakespear, by the Irish poet in 1896.

The rather formal inscription in ink from Yeats, most likely for reasons of discretion, reads: “Mrs Shakespear,/from WB Yeats/February 1896”.

Yeats first met Shakespear at a literary soiree in London in 1894 while in the throes of his hopeless longings for Maud Gonne.

Shakespear was in a loveless marriage to the barrister Henry Hope Shakespear; in 1886 she had given birth to Dorothy Shakespear, who would later become the wife of poet Ezra Pound.

Apart from the obvious literary interests, Yeats and Shakespear shared a fascination with the occult.

In 1896, the year of the inscription, the relationship became physically intimate; it was said to be the 30-year-old poet’s first real amour.

While the affair was short-lived, lasting barely a year before the poet’s affections turned once again to the unattainable Gonne, Shakespear remained a close friend and confidant of Yeats until her death in 1938.

The book goes under the hammer at Doyle New York’s rare book auction on Wednesday with a guide price of between $10,000 and $15,000 (€7,000 and €10,400).

Several of Yeats's early poems in the 1899 collection, Wind Among the Reeds, refer to the romance with Shakespear which, by his own admission, ended because he could not dispel the image of Maud Gonne out of his mind.

The untimely ending of the affair seems, however, to have been a source of regret to Yeats in later life.

The poem, After Long Silence, written in 1932 about Shakespear ends with the line: "Young, We loved each other and were ignorant".

Professor of Irish history at Oxford University and Yeats’s biographer Roy Foster said: “Yeats was professionally unhappy in love but he had a talent for remaining friends with ex-lovers. He and Olivia were extremely close. She was the centre of his life in London and they shared a terrific correspondence that goes right through until her death.”

Her sudden death from a heart attack in 1938, just months before Yeats died, is said to have left the poet distraught.

At the time, Yeats wrote: “Olivia Shakespear has died suddenly. For more than 40 years she has been the centre of my life in London and during all that time we have never had a quarrel, sadness sometimes but never a difference . . . She was not more lovely than distinguished – no matter what happened she never lost her solitude . . . For the moment I cannot bear the thought of London. I will find her memory everywhere.”

Yeats’s connection to the Shakespear-Pound families proved to have a major influence on his life.

It was through Dorothy Shakespear that he was introduced to Georgie Hyde-Lees in 1911, Dorothy’s close friend and cousin, whom he would eventually marry.

Two years earlier Ezra Pound had travelled from the US to London to meet the older writer whom he considered “the greatest living poet”.

The two spent several years wintered together at Ashdown Park, south of London, with Pound acting as Yeats’s de facto secretary.

It was his long-term association with Pound, an ardent supporter of fascism, that may have, at least in part, drawn Yeats to express support for the Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini in later life.

The book is being sold from the estate of Omar Shakespear, Ezra and Dorothy’s son, a poet and translator in his own right, who died last year.

The volume has pencil notes in three places, probably by Olivia Shakespear. One contains a quotation of Yeats "a brief forgiveness between opposites", taken from Cúchulainn's speech in On Baile's Strand.