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