W. B. Yeats


This willed coincidence between his life and work guarantees Yeats's stature as the greatest modern poet in the English language. His life is a spectacular series of revisions and "re-makings" of the self; its accidents he repeatedly translated into the permanences of art, his own history into myth. At 19 years of age, "he lived, breathed, ate, drank and slept poetry." In his last letter he wrote, "Man can embody truth but he cannot know it. . . . You can refute Hegel, but not the Saint or the Song of Sixpence." Sanctity and poetry were the embodiments of truth. Yeats successfully staked his life on the second: his poetry embodies the truth of his life. As if to carry this truth beyond the grave (he was reinterred in Sligo in 1948), the words on histombstone are the last words in his Collected Poems: "Cast a cold eye/On life, on death./Horseman, pass by!"
 
 

Stolen Child
Dream of Death
Faeryland
More to come

 



 


Created by TracyG~1998, 1999