Yeats · 1923
Yeats and the Nobel speech
On the evening of the fifteenth of December 1923, in the Concert Hall of the Old Royal Academy of Music in Stockholm, William Butler Yeats, fifty-eight years old, the recently elected Senator of the Irish Free State (constituted on the fifteenth of January 1922) and the foundational poet of the Irish Literary Revival, delivered the Nobel Lecture upon his receipt of the Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded to him on the fourteenth of November 1923 for *his always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation*. The Lecture, titled *The Irish Dramatic Movement*, ran for about forty-five minutes. He spoke about the founding of the Abbey Theatre in 1904 with Lady Gregory and J. M. Synge, the riots over Synge's *Playboy of the Western World* in 1907, the role of the theatre in shaping the new Irish state, and the long argument with the previous generation of his country's nationalist movement (a movement that had, by the date of the speech, won the political independence Yeats had been arguing for in his poetry for forty years). The speech was, by his own private statement to his wife George the next morning, the most consequential public statement of his life, and the moment at which the Irish literary movement (which he had founded with seven other people at George Pollexfen's house in 1888) entered the world canon of national literatures.
It is twenty past seven on the evening of the fifteenth of December 1923, in the upper green-room of the Old Royal Academy of Music on Nybrokajen in central Stockholm, in heavy winter cold with the Swedish snow on the harbour outside. He is fifty-eight years old. He is William Butler Yeats, born at Sandymount, Dublin, on the thirteenth of June 1865, son of John Butler Yeats the portrait painter and Susan Pollexfen of Sligo, schooled at the Godolphin School in Hammersmith and the Erasmus Smith High School in Dublin and the Metropolitan School of Art on Kildare Street, founder (with Lady Augusta Gregory) of the Irish Literary Theatre in 1899, founder (with Lady Gregory and J. M. Synge and Annie Horniman's purse) of the Abbey Theatre in 1904, Senator of the Irish Free State by the personal commission of W. T. Cosgrave's government since the fifteenth of December 1922 (a year to the day before the evening), Nobel laureate in Literature.
His wife George (Bertha Georgie Hyde-Lees, married to Yeats in October 1917, the medium of the Vision automatic-writing project of the previous five years), thirty-one years old, is in the green-room with him in a long blue evening dress. They have come up to Stockholm from Dublin via London by sleeper train and steamer on the previous Tuesday.
On the table in front of him is the typescript of the Nobel Lecture, which he has drafted at the Hotel Continental in the past three days. The Lecture is titled The Irish Dramatic Movement. He has, in the past two hours, made three further pencil revisions to the closing four paragraphs. The closing argument is, by his own intention, that the Abbey Theatre is the institutional expression of the Irish-national imagination, and that the Irish-national imagination, having been constituted in the past forty years principally by the Abbey, has produced the political state in which he now serves as a Senator.
He thinks: the Civil War ended at home in May. The country I am giving the Lecture about is a country still working out the basis of the legitimacy of the state. The country has, since January 1922, lost three thousand five hundred dead in the Civil War. The country has, in the past month, executed seventy-seven anti-Treaty IRA men under the Cosgrave Public Safety Act.
He thinks: I cannot say in the Nobel Lecture that the literary movement produced the state. I can say in the Nobel Lecture that the literary movement and the political movement were the same movement.
He thinks: Augusta is at Coole. Lady Gregory is at Coole writing the Coole Park journals and is, by the letter she sent me last week, glad I have the Prize but is privately of the view that Synge should have had the Prize fifteen years ago if he had lived. Synge died in 1909. Synge cannot have the Prize. The Prize comes to the survivor of the movement, which is me.
He thinks: Sara Allgood and the Abbey company are at Coole this week reading the Pot of Broth for the Christmas tour. The world I am about to describe in the Lecture is the world the Abbey is still in tonight.
He goes out at twenty past seven into the main hall. The audience is the Nobel Banquet audience, about a hundred and eighty in formal dress, including the Crown Prince of Sweden and the Swedish Academy. The Lecture takes forty-five minutes. He delivers it without notes from a sheet on the lectern; he has the closing peroration in memory. The closing peroration is the quoted closing paragraph of the Lecture: I think when I make that boast for our Theatre, I would gladly include in it the part played by my friend Lady Gregory, but I am too well aware that this would be an injustice to the world's perfect knowledge of her own accomplishment; my country, and the world's, have given her her own boast. The audience stands at the end.
Yeats was awarded the Nobel medal by King Gustaf V at the presentation ceremony on the tenth of December (the date of the founder Alfred Nobel's death, which by the tradition is the presentation date). The medal is, by Yeats's bequest of 1939, in the National Library of Ireland in Dublin. He used the Nobel Prize purse (about £7,500, the equivalent of about £430,000 in 2025 money) to buy the late Yeats home, Thoor Ballylee, the Norman tower-house at Gort in County Galway near Coole Park, which became the setting for the poems of the late Yeats period (The Tower, The Winding Stair).
W. B. Yeats died at the Hôtel Idéal Séjour, Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, on the French Riviera, on the twenty-eighth of January 1939, seventy-three years old. He was buried at Roquebrune during the war years; his remains were repatriated to Ireland by the Irish Free State navy on the seventeenth of September 1948 and reinterred under his own epitaph at Drumcliffe churchyard in County Sligo: Cast a cold eye on life, on death. Horseman, pass by. The Drumcliffe grave is one of the most-visited literary tombs in Ireland, with its view across the bay to the flat-topped mountain of Ben Bulben on which much of the early Yeats imagination had been formed. The Nobel Lecture of December 1923 is preserved in the Swedish Academy archive and is, on the centenary of December 2023, the published text of the principal anniversary essay of the Irish Times.