IV.

Disillusionment and Change

In 1908 an eight-volume Collected Works in Verse and Prose was published, and Yeats felt that, as a poet, he had gone out of fashion. When, after leaving the Abbey Theatre, he made a full return to poetry, with works such as The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910), Yeats strove to abandon his earlier self-conscious softness and facility. Ireland became less idealized: it was a “fool-driven land” and a “blind, bitter land”. He began to write poems on public, modern subjects such as “At the Abbey Theatre” and “To a Poet...”. By the time of The Wild Swans at Coole (1919) Yeats had moved away from the nervous rhythms and misty images of his earlier symbolism and adopted a more steely tone that employed a more physical and corporeal vocabulary. His work became clearer, leaner, and more aware of the forces of sexuality and violence, aiming for a tone that in “The Fisherman” (1919) is described as “cold/And passionate as the dawn”.

By the end of the 19th century, Yeats was an isolated and embittered figure in the Irish nationalist movement. As he grew older, his attitude to the politics of independence became more ambivalent. “To a Shade” (1914) advises Charles Stewart Parnell, the politician who nearly secured Home Rule for Ireland in the 1890s, to remain in the tomb. In “Easter 1916” (1921), a poem that refers to the Easter Rising, an uprising against British rule in Dublin, he reflects on this attitude, one suspended between celebration and horror: in the action of the rebels and their violent suppression by the British government, Yeats wrote, “a terrible beauty is born”. The leaders, 15 of whom were executed, quoted Yeats's Cathleen ni Houlihan to their supporters: in a later poem he asked “Did that play of mine send out / Certain men the English shot?” Despite his misgivings, Yeats served in the Senate of the new Irish Free State from 1922 to 1928.