Personal Impressions of W. B. Yeats

Abstract

I knew W. B. Yeats before he had discovered in himself the divine faculty of verse, though his life was already full of vision. In those early days his tendency was toward science, and we carried out together a number of more or less ingenious and unsuccessful experiments in physics, chemistry, and electricity, with home-made contrivances often destined for quite other uses. Our researches soon took a different field, which, I have always thought, was of high importance for Yeats’s poetry. He was a rabid Darwinian, and, like all new proselytes, longed for a convert; and I, as his school chum, was the natural prey. So Yeats spent the hours that should have gone to Homer and Horace in pursuit of test cases and missing links, with which I was in due time to be belabored; and many a delightful afternoon we spent roaming over the Dublin hills, or the cliffs of Howth, Yeats holding forth on evolutionary botany, while I listened, commented, and at the end of ends, declared myself still unconvinced. Unconvinced of the materialism that so often goes with Darwinism, that is; though accepting the idea of growth and development.

Harper’s Weekly (New York) XLVIII, 20 Feb 1904, p. 291.