Faith is a personal thing. This chapter finally faces that fact. As an undergraduate, studying English literature at York University in the early 1990s, I was intensely preoccupied by the question of faith. Without giving you the full Augustine, I want to recount some aspects of this experience, as a way of continuing to reflect on the complex interaction of religious, political and literary faith in modern thought.

Literary faith came first, at first. The poet who fascinated me was Yeats. I still think that his poetry contains some of the most extreme verbal beauty in English, but aged nineteen I was more sensitive to it than now. And this impinged on my ideas about the world. Yeats was a sort of overripe Romantic, whose aestheticism was linked to the reactionary cause of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy. His belief in natural, genetic nobility was influenced by Nietzsche. His is one of the most powerful reactionary voices ever, in my opinion. Part of what impressed me was his commitment to his poet persona: he saw himself as a visionary, called to help create a nobler culture than that of the tawdry modern world, and to believe in the value of ancient Irish myths. In his poem “Meditations in Time of Civil War” (1923) he questions his vocation, wondering