W. B. Yeats

"Nowadays, whether he is thought of as a national bard or a world poet, Yeats figures in the mind as a translated force, an energy released and a destiny fulfilled.

Still, as a poet with a strong histrionic streak and a readiness to identify himself with variously anti-establishment  and anti-populist causes in the course of a long lifetime, Yeats was never without his detractors. Yet from the beginning, those most intent upon debunking the man or demythologizing the poet could never deny that his commitments were as selfless as they were ardent. Neither George Moore (Yeat's senior) nor James Joyce (his junior) ever doubted that the phenomenon known as the Irish Literary Revival represented the execution of high artistic purpose, although both of them found fault with Yeats's ways of discharging that purpose. Moore, as a fellow member of the middle-class, mocked him for affecting a Renaissance  hauteur and for getting carried away by his aristocratic fantasies. Joyce, more indigent and less socially advantaged, was oddly enough enraged by what he perceived as the poet's downward mobility ...

What Joyce could not know, of course, was that a new, convulsive energy was building in the poet as the effort to bind himself to a national purpose - 'Theatre business, management of men' - collided with his antithetical and more powerful drive to assert the claims of individual personality over every solidarity. A decade later, in Responsibilities (1914) and The Wild Swans at Coole (1919), a poetry of singular clarity and detachment would spring from the tension generated in him between his ideal of service to a new, imagined Ireland and his recognition of the demeaned standards actually preferred by the Ireland in which he was living. It all contributed to the emergence of a new poetic voice, intellectually pugnacious, emotionally renovated and rhetorically high-spirited."

from Introduction, by Seamus Heaney
W. B. Yeats: Poems selected by Seamus Heaney
2000 Faber and Faber, London