partly Tudor vocabulary.' The heroic legends of ancient Ireland and the folk traditions of the modern Irish countryside helped brace his early dreamlike imagery. 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree'? 'my first lyric with anything in its rhythm of my own music,' said Yeats?is both a Romantic evocation of escape into dream, art, and the imagination, and a specifically Irish reverie on freedom and self-reliance.
Yeats vigorously hybridizes Irish and English traditions, and eventually draws into this potent intercultural mix East and South Asian cultural resources, including Japanese Noh theater and Indian meditative practices. Resolutely Irish, he imaginatively reclaims a land colonized by the British; imposes Irish rhythms, images, genres, and syntax on English-language poetry; and revives native myths, place-names, and consciousness. Yet he is also cosmopolitan, insisting on the transnationalism of the collective storehouse of images he calls 'Spiritus Mundi' or 'Anima Mundi,' spending much of his life in England, and cross-pollinating forms, ideas, and images from Ireland and England, Europe and Asia.
Irish nationalism first sent Yeats in search of a consistently simpler and more popular style, to express the elemental facts about Irish life and aspirations. This led him to the concrete image, as did translations from Gaelic folk songs, in which 'nothing . . . was abstract, nothing worn-out.' But other forces were also working on him. In 1902 a friend gave him the works of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, to which he responded with great excitement, and it would seem that, in persuading the passive love-poet to get off his knees, Nietzsche's books intensified his search for a more active stance, a more vigorous style. At the start of the twentieth century, Yeats wearied of his early languid aesthetic, declaring his intentions, in a 1901 letter, to make 'everything hard and clear' and, in another of 1904, to leave behind 'sentiment and sentimental sadness.' He wished for poems not of disembodied beauty but that could 'carry the normal, passionate, reasoning self, the personality as a whole.' In poems of his middle period, such as 'Adam's Curse' and 'A Coat,' Yeats combines the colloquial with the formal, enacting in his more austere diction, casual rhythms, and passionate syntax his will to leave behind the poetic 'embroideries' of his youth and walk 'naked.' The American poet Ezra Pound, who spent winters from 1913 to
1916 with Yeats in a stone cottage in Sussex, strengthened Yeats's resolve to develop a less mannered, more stripped down style.
In 1889 Yeats had met the beautiful actor and Irish nationalist Maud Gonne, with whom he was desperately in love for many years, but who persistently refused to marry him. She became the subject of many of his early love poems, and in later poems, such as 'No Second Troy' and 'A Prayer for My Daughter,' he expresses anger over her self-sacrifice to political activism. He had also met Lady Gregory, Anglo-Irish writer and promoter of Irish literature, in 1896, and Yeats spent many
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holidays at her aristocratic country house, Coole Park. Disliking the moneygrubbing and prudery of the middle classes, as indicated in 'September 1913,' he looked for his ideal characters either below them, to peasants and beggars, or above them, to the aristocracy, for each of these had their own traditions and lived according to them. Under Lady Gregory's influence Yeats began to organize the Irish dramatic movement in 1899 and, with her help, founded the Abbey Theater in 1904. His active participation in theatrical production?confronting political censorship, economic problems of paying carpenters and actors, and other aspects of 'theatre business, management of men'?also helped toughen his style, as he demonstrates in 'The Fascination of What's Difficult.' Yeats's long-cherished hope had been to 'bring the halves together'?Protestant and Catholic?through a literature infused with Ireland's ancient myths and cultural riches before the divisions between rival Christianities. But in a string of national controversies, he ran afoul of both the Boman Catholic middle class and the Anglo-Irish Protestant ascendancy, and at last, bitterly turning his back on Ireland, moved to England.
Then came the Easter Bising of 1916, led by men and women he had long known, some of whom were executed or imprisoned by the British. Persuaded by Gonne (whose estranged husband was one of the executed leaders) that 'tragic dignity had returned to Ireland,' Yeats returned. His culturally nationalist work had helped inspire the poet revolutionaries, and so he asked himself, as he put it in the late poem 'Man and the Echo,' did his work 'send out / Certain men the English shot?' Yeats's nationalism and antinationalism, his divided loyalties to Ireland and to England, find powerfully ambivalent expression in 'Easter, 1916' and other poems. Throughout his poetry he brilliantly mediates between contending aspects of himself?late-Bomantic visionary and astringent modern skeptic, Irish patriot and irreverent antinationalist, shrewd man of action and esoteric dreamer. As he said: 'We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.' Conceiving consciousness as conflict, he fashioned a kind of poetry that could embody the contradictory feelings and ideas of his endless inner debate.
To mark his recommitment to Ireland, Yeats refurbished and renamed Thoor (Castle) Ballylee, the Norman tower on Lady Gregory's land, in which he lived off and on, and which became, along with its inner winding stair, a central symbol in his later poetry. In 1922 he was appointed a senator of the recently established Irish Free State, and he served until 1928, playing an active part not only in promoting the arts but also in general political affairs, in which he supported the views of the minority Protestant landed class. At the same time he was continuing his esoteric studies. He married Georgie (changed by Yeats to George) Hyde Lees in 1917, when he was fifty- two, and she proved so sympathetic to his imaginative needs that the automatic writing she produced for several years (believed by Yeats to have been dictated by spirits) gave him the elements of a symbolic system that he later worked out in his book A Vision (1925, 1937). The system was a theory of the movements of history and of the different types of personality, each movement and type being related to a different phase of the moon. At the center of the symbolic system were the interpenetrating cones, or 'gyres,' that represented the movement through major cycles of history and across antitheses of human personality.
He compressed and embodied his personal mythology in visionary poems of great scope, linguistic force, and incantatory power, such as 'The Second Coming' and 'Leda and the Swan.' In poems of the 1920s and 1930s, winding stairs, spinning tops, 'gyres,' spirals of all kinds, are important symbols, serving as a means of resolving some of the contraries that had arrested him from the beginning?paradoxes of time and eternity, change and continuity, spirit and the body, life and art. If his earliest poetry was sometimes static, a beautifully stitched tapestry laden with symbols of inner states, his late poetry became more dynamic, its propulsive syntax and muscular rhythms more suited to his themes of lust, rage, and the body. He had once screened these out of his verse as unpoetic, along with war, violence, 'the mire of
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human veins.' Now he embraced the mortal world intensely. In 'A Dialogue of Self and Soul,' the self defies the soul's injunction to leave the world behind: 'I am content to live it all again / And yet again, if it be life to pitch / Into the frog-spawn of a blind man's ditch.' Yeats no longer sought transcendence of the human, but instead aimed for the active interpenetration of the corporeal and the visionary. In his Nietzscheinspired poems of 'tragic joy,' such as 'Lapis Lazuli,' he affirmed ruin and destruction as necessary to imaginative creation.
One key to Yeats's greatness is that there are many different Yeatses: a hard-nosed skeptic and an esoteric idealist, a nativist and a cosmopolitan, an Irish nationalist and an ironic antinationalist, a Romantic brooding on loss and unrequited desire and a modernist mocking idealism, nostalgia, and contemporary society. Similarly, in his poetic innovations and consolidations, he is both a conservative and a radical. That is, he is a literary traditionalist,
