ellauri053.html on line 1363: Yeats derided MacBride in letters and in poetry. He was horrified by Gonne's marriage, at losing his muse to another man; in addition, her conversion to Catholicism before marriage offended him; Yeats was Protestant/agnostic. He worried his muse would come under the influence of the priests and do their bidding.
ellauri053.html on line 1364: Gonne's marriage to MacBride was a disaster. This pleased Yeats, as Gonne began to visit him in London.
ellauri053.html on line 1365: To get a divorce, Gonne made a series of allegations against her husband with Yeats as her main 'second', though he did not attend court or travel to France. A divorce was not granted, for the only accusation that held up in court was that MacBride had been drunk once during the marriage.
ellauri053.html on line 1367: Yeats's friendship with Gonne ended when in Paris in 1908, they finally consummated their relationship. "The long years of fidelity rewarded at last" was how another of his lovers described the event. (Bet it was Ezra Pound.) Yeats was less sentimental and later remarked that "the tragedy of sexual intercourse is the perpetual virginity of the soul." (Aika narsistinen penselmä.) The relationship did not develop into a new phase after their night together, and soon afterwards Gonne wrote to the poet indicating that despite the physical consummation, they could not continue as they had been. She recommended Yeats to concentrate on other men.
ellauri053.html on line 1370: By 1916, Yeats was 51 years old and determined to marry and produce an heir. His rival John MacBride had been executed for his role in the 1916 Easter Rising, so Yeats hoped that his widow might remarry. His final proposal to Maud Gonne took place in mid-1916. Gonne's history of revolutionary political activism, as well as a series of personal catastrophes in the previous few years of her life—including chloroform addiction and her troubled marriage to MacBride—not to mention that she was 50—made her a potentially unsuitable wife; biographer R. F. Foster has observed that Yeats's last offer was motivated more by a sense of duty than by a genuine desire to marry her.
ellauri053.html on line 1371: Yeats proposed in an indifferent manner, with conditions attached, and he both expected and hoped she would turn him down. According to Foster, "when he duly asked Maud to marry him and was duly refused, his thoughts shifted with surprising speed to her daughter." Iseult Gonne was Maud's second child with Lucien Millevoye, and at the time was twenty-one years old.
ellauri053.html on line 1373: When Gonne took action to divorce MacBride in 1905, the court heard allegations that he had sexually assaulted Iseult, then eleven. At fifteen, she proposed to Yeats. In 1917, he proposed to Iseult but was rejected.
ellauri197.html on line 153: - Yeats was all his life passionately devoted to a woman named Maud Gonne :D She had an affair with him which meant everything to him, and wrote many poems in her honor, but she refused to marry him. She married someone else, and so he had to marry someone else as well, but he always cherished her above all. She was "THE" woman to him. It may be for her sake that he imagined love from HER point of view. Meanwhile he and his second-choice wife had a son and a daughter, whom he loved dearly. That's sad... For all parties involved.
ellauri198.html on line 823: Spending most of his time in London, Yeats met with Maud Gonne, a tall, beautiful, socially prominent young woman passionately devoted to Irish nationalism. Yeats soon fell in love with Gonne, and courted her for nearly three decades although he eventually learned that she had already borne two children from a long affair. Their sole attempt at copulation at long last in Paris ended with a fizz. Yeats found he actually really liked young boys and girls.
ellauri198.html on line 826: Gonne shared Yeats’s interest in occultism and spiritualism. Yeats had been a theosophist, but in 1890 he turned from its sweeping mystical insights and joined the Golden Dawn, a secret society that actually practiced ritual magic. Yeats remained an active member of the Golden Dawn for 32 years, becoming involved in its direction at the turn of the century and achieving the coveted sixth grade of membership in 1914, the same year that his surrogate wife, Georgiana Hyde-Lees, also joined the society.
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