W.B. Yeats is a master of emotion. A nationalist poet; a phantasmagorical poet, who throughout his work delicately intertwines the tragicomedy of his personal life with Irish politics. He is a poet of vigorous creative energy; a sensual, spiritual poet whose voice of that is contradiction and conflict. His dialectical poems are a battleground for the raging of warring ideas that attempt to reconcile the tumultuous world surrounding him.

Historical context when reading Yeats’ poetry is crucial. Yeats was born in 1865 into a protestant Anglo-Irish family. Throughout his poetry, Yeats muses on the state of violence in his personal and political life. Yeats was deeply involved with Irish nationalism. He is often associated with the freedom fighter John O’Leary and knew several of the leaders who were later executed by the British: such as MacBride, Pearse, MacDonagh. The political activist Maud Gonne haunts much of his work. He met Maud when he was 23 in 1889 and courted her for almost 3 decades. The sonnet The Cold Heaven explores his defeated love for Maud, as The Wind Among the Reeds articulates painful unrequited love. In one of my favourites, The Wild Swans at Coole, a man at 51 looks at the same spot as he did often when 32: ‘I have looked upon those brilliant creatures/And now my heart is sore/All’s changed since’.

His fascination with occultism and the supernatural sits at the heart of his work. In his early years, he joined the Golden Dawn, a secretive, hermetic society of ritual magic. Yeats uses the phantasmagorial to gain a hold on his reality. His early poetry combines nationalism and his occult interests. In To Ireland in the Coming Times, Yeats uses the fantastical to reconnect with the essence and folklore of Ireland and his patriotic predecessors. In the case of Leda and the Swan, Yeats draws on mythology. He married Georgie Hyde-Lees in 1917 who had a talent for automatic writing, and they worked together on the famous A Vision.

Like his contemporaries Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, Yeats is preoccupied with the notion of the self, as he articulates the struggles of Irish identity. Throughout his poetry, Yeats mediates on what it is to be a poet. His investment in the golden imaginative future throughout his work has prompted him to be described as the last of the ‘Romantics’, as he examines the power of the imagination versus the frailty of human existence. In Sailing to Byzantium, Yeats details the agony of ageing, reborn into the permeance of art as a mechanised bird. Dreams for Yeats offer solace in a world of political and personal tragedies. By addressing the conceit of poetry itself, his work gains a fascinating friction. Stylistically, his work spans many styles and genres from Romantic to Modernist to Victorian. But what sets him apart from his contemporaries is his delight in form and desire for order throughout his work.

The world of Ireland that Yeats creates is certainly bleak, personified through the ‘rough beast’ in his poem The Second Coming and the demonic dragon-ridden world of his poem Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen. A world Yeats is both estranged from and pulled passionately towards in nationalistic love. His poem No Second Troy articulates a voice of questioning, interrogating his politics and rejecting extremism, whereas his later poem Lapis Lazuli accepts destruction as inevitable. The famous poem Easter 1916 was written to commemorate the Dublin insurrectionists within national memory, both praising and daringly criticising the sacrifice. Much of his poetry undergoes powerful and complex emotional journeys that very often do not release a finite resolution. It is this conflict that sits at the centre of his work, this struggle that renders his poetry remarkable. Yeats described poetry as a ‘quarrel with ourselves’. He is certainly a master of conflict.