Yeats

Yeats’ major achievement was as a poet, but in his own life he adopted many other roles: politician, orator, theosophist, journalist, ‘public man

Because all these directly fed Yeats’ imagination, they need to be included, as Denis Donoghue argues, in any account of the context of feeling, the sensibility, from which the poetry emerged.

Self, imagination, will, action, symbol, history, world, vision, self-transformation: for Denis Donoghue these are the key notions at the centre of Yeats’ work, and his essay explores their significance to draw out the unique power and authority of the poetry.