The Two Lives of W. B. Yeats

Abstract

Perhaps it is a part of Yeats’ modernity that, in contrast to the visionary poets studied in earlier chapters, it proves impossible to understand his poetry except as an aspect of his life’s work. It is not only that much of his poetry springs from occasions, places, people, possessions and events. His poetry is the record of his struggle to be a particular kind of man: to make his own personality. It acquires greater depth when seen alongside Yeats’ other activities, which were many. He was an agent in the birth of Ireland as a nation and as a cultural force in the twentieth century, indeed a Senator of the Irish Free State who looked one day and found himself ‘a sixty-year-old smiling public man’. This was the more surprising since he was always painfully shy, and since he was temperamentally inclined to solitude and inner work. He would for much of his life have rejected the approach to his verse proposed here, feeling that

The intellect of man is forced to choose

Perfection of the life, or of the work.

I was confirmed in this opinion, that he who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things, ought himself to be a true poem …

— Milton