The Life of W.B. Yeats

W.B. Yeats believed that the life of a lyric poet was an experiment in living that should be told. This new critical biography seeks to tell that story as it unfolded. It considers a career that began in the late Victorian world of 1880s London, and involved a deep commitment to the life of an emergent Ireland in the 20th century. Disillusionment and alienation from the modern world made Yeats, who began as a symbolist poet, one of the major figures of the Modernist movement in the second decade of the century. A central focus of this study is Yeats's perennial pursuit of sacral power which he saw as being vested in traditional institutions. It examines how at various stages of his life he sought to acquire such power for himself in such "institutions" as a magical order, a nation, a theatre, the community of the dead, and, climatically, an occult marriage.