Chapter 3 - Late Yeats

Summary

All changed, changed utterly: / A terrible beauty is born.

“Easter, 1916”

Yeats's late poems and plays rejuvenate the impassioned spirit of his nineties work without disregarding the fiercer, more skeptical disposition that directed his subsequent development. Their rejuvenated spirit derives from the terrible beauty of the Easter Rising and its aftermath, from the emotional and occult energies set free by the poet's marriage, and from the international recognition reflected in such honors as the Nobel Prize for Literature. But while such occurrences partly restored Yeats's early hopes, he always had to settle for something short of his initial desires. He found love and marriage, but not with Maud Gonne. He became a Senator in an independent Irish state, but that state was born in appalling violence, and in his view did not properly accommodate the Anglo-Irish. He achieved spiritual illumination, but that illumination postponed individual redemption until after death and cultural redemption for some future era. Yeats succeeded more and more in constructing his own self, his own art, his own house, family, and religion. But he failed to revive a unified Irish tradition in which he could root these individual triumphs. This chapter explores his life and work between the tumults of 1916–17 and his death in 1939.

Lunar visions: The Wild Swans at Coole

The first version of The Wild Swans at Coole, published by Lolly Yeats's handpress in 1917, reads more like a continuation of Yeats's middle period than the start of something new.