Today is the 160 birthday of the renowned poet and Golden Dawn member W.B. Yeats. One of his contemporaries in the Golden Dawn was The Prophet of the Lovely Star. An excerpt of one biographical sketch notes:
Yeats had been a theosophist, but in 1890 he turned from its sweeping mystical insights and joined the Golden Dawn, a secret society that 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 future wife, Georgiana Hyde-Lees, also joined the society.
Although Yeats’s occult ambitions were a powerful force in his private thoughts, the Golden Dawn’s emphasis on the supernatural clashed with his own need as a poet for interaction in the physical world, and thus in his public role he preferred to follow the example of John Keats, a Romantic poet who remained—in comparison with Romantics William Blake and Percy Bysshe Shelley—relatively close to the materials of life. Yeats avoided what he considered the obscurity of Blake, whose poetic images came from mystical visions rather than from the familiar physical world. Even so, Yeats’s visionary and idealist interests were more closely aligned with those of Blake and Shelley than with those of Keats, and in the 1899 collection The Wind among the Reeds he employed occult symbolism in several poems.
Read the whole biography: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/william-butler-yeats
