“The Poet and the Actress”: An Unpublished Dialogue by W. B. Yeats

Abstract

The tragedy of vision, “that struggle of a dream with the world”, is the art form in whose service the Poet would enlist the Actress in W. B. Yeats’s hitherto unpublished 1916 dialogue “The Poet and the Actress”.¹ “The end of art is ecstasy, and that cannot exist without pain. It is [a] sudden sense of power and of peace, that comes when we have before our mind’s eye a group of images which obeys us, which leaves us free, and which satisfies the need of our soul.” The tragic poet “shows the pain side by side with the ecstasy…. He must be able to see reality without flinching.”