William M. Murphy, Biographer of W. B. Yeats’s Family, Is Dead at 92.Remembering one of the world’s greatest poets, W.B. Yeats, who was awarded the 1923 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation."

Remembering one of the world’s greatest poets, W.B. Yeats, who was awarded the 1923 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation."

What is your favourite poem by Yeats?

#WorldPoetryDay

William M. Murphy, Biographer of W. B. Yeats’s Family, Is Dead at 92

By WILLIAM GRIMES

Published: October 8, 2008

William M. Murphy, whose biographies of the family of William Butler Yeats shed light on his personal and creative relationships and led scholars to reassess the importance of his father and sisters, died on Sept. 26 in Schenectady, N.Y. He was 92 and lived in Schenectady; Shag Harbour, Nova Scotia; and Pompano Beach, Fla.

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William M. Murphy Collection

William M. Murphy in 1965.

The death was confirmed by his wife, Harriet, known as Tottie.

Mr. Murphy, who taught at Union College in Schenectady for nearly 40 years, put Yeats in a new context with “Prodigal Father: The Life of John Butler Yeats” (1978), a biography of the poet’s father, and “Family Secrets: William Butler Yeats and His Relatives” (1995). Richard Ellmann, Yeats’s eminent biographer, called “Prodigal Father” an “outstanding picture of the life of Ireland’s greatest family.”

Drawing on letters, diaries and other primary documents that he and his wife painstakingly transcribed, Mr. Murphy recreated the complicated creative and emotional lives of Yeats’s Micawberish father, a lawyer turned painter, and his three other children, Jack (also a painter), Lily and Lollie. “He filled in the blanks,” said Edward O’Shea, a Yeats scholar at the State University of New York at Oswego. “For too long we had the notion of great artists like Yeats working in isolation. He revealed the complex interactions between Yeats and his family members, and how that made the art possible. He also helped extricate them from the orbit of Yeats’s influence exclusively, and to encourage us to see them as productive and interesting artists in their own right.”

William Murphy was born in Astoria, Queens, and grew up in Flushing. He earned his bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees at Harvard University, where he taught for three years before becoming secretary of the university’s committee on educational relations.

In 1939 he married Harriet Doane. Mr. Murphy is survived by their children, Christopher Ten Broeck Murphy of Bethany, Conn., Deborah Chase Murphy of Alexandria, Va., and Susan Doane Murphy Thompson of Littleton, Colo.; six grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.

In 1943 he joined the Navy, where he helped write a manual on the use of rockets in aircraft anti-submarine warfare. While an intelligence officer on an aircraft carrier in the North Atlantic, he saw his instructions bear fruit when pilots sank a German submarine.

In 1946 he joined the English department at Union College, where he taught until retiring in 1983. Although Yeats was his passion — he acquired a vast archive of Yeats material, including family letters and paintings by John Butler Yeats — he also wrote on Shakespeare, attacking efforts to propose alternative authors for the plays, and on religious freedom and the separation of church and state in America. A Democrat, he maintained a keen interest in politics throughout his life. He made unsuccessful runs for Congress in 1948, and in the early 1950s was a chairman of the housing authority in Schenectady, overseeing the desegregation of public housing in the city.

He ran unsuccessfully for the state Senate in 1956 and the state Assembly in 1959, and from 1961 to 1968 was on the state advisory committee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights.

At the housing authority one of his colleagues was Jeanne Robert Foster, a poet who had cared for John Butler Yeats in his final years and buried him in Chestertown, N.Y. Mr. Murphy, who had been teaching Shakespeare and Chaucer, gave way to Foster’s importunings and traveled to Dublin with the idea of writing a small article on John Butler Yeats’s American sojourn. There he became friends with Yeats’s son and widow.

“She brought out biscuit tins filled with letters from John Butler Yeats to all his children,” Mrs. Murphy said. “At that point it became obvious that a small article was not going to do the job.”

Mr. Murphy had found his mission. Eventually, he inherited the gravesite of John Butler Yeats. “He is the only author who owns the body of the person he wrote about,” Mrs. Murphy suggested.