Yeats, William Butler

1 page (7 x 4 1/2 in.; 178 x 115mm), Dublin, 3 November [1908]; horizontal fold.  With autograph envelope.

Yeats to the wife of his mentor, Arthur Symons.  W. B. Yeats always acknowledged the debt his poetry owed to Symons' verse and to his early championing of Baudelaire and Verlaine in England.  He was an important contributor to the Yellow Book and a member of Yeats's Rhymer's Club.  As co-editor of The Savoy, he edited and published Yeats.  In 1908, Symons began to suffer from bouts of insanity.  He was confined to an asylum and in 1909 he suffered a complete psychotic breakdown.  He was released from the asylum several years later and lived until 1945, but with diminished capacities. 

In this letter, written from the Nassau Hotel in Dublin, Yeats discusses an unpublished poem by Symons and expresses his sympathy.  "Would you send me the poem here? I do not believe that Arthur Symons made a bad rhyme.  If there is a mistake I will do my best to put it right but a mistake is very unlikely.  Your husband has always been most masterly in all his uses of rhyme & rythms.  I feel very much for your misfortune.  I wrote very constantly with the thought of your husband's opinion in my mind—though I saw him so little.  Now I shall miss him always."