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W.B. Yeats: The Man and the Milieu.

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From: Contemporary Review
Date: 19971201
Author:Heptonstall, Geoffrey

Like his enemy, Eamon de Valera, William Butler Yeats casts a long shadow. He set out to re-create a national culture, and in doing so become its supreme exemplar across a century. There seems a Yeats for each generation. The poetry invites its music, and so from Count MacCormac to Bono the lyric moves from the examination hall into general culture. Yeats learned much from folk traditions on the lips of tinkers and farm-girls. He would surely approve of his place in living ways of expressing all the things he held dear: love, mystery and the imaginative potential of life.

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