In 1914 – an appropriate year – W. B. Yeats, who figures significantly in what follows, as much in his effect on his successors as in his own work, published a volume called Responsibilities. It bears what has since become an extremely well-known epigraph: ‘In dreams begins responsibility.’ The quotation is attributed only to an ‘Old Play’, but this has never been traced and it is widely assumed that Yeats wrote the epigraph himself. If this is so, then he is curiously avoiding responsibility for an epigraph itself evoking responsibility and proposing, strangely, that its origin lies in imagination or unconscious drive or desire. Yeats's evasiveness possibly suggests anxiety that any declaration of the kind may appear sententious or self-serving in a poet. Responsibilities has, even so, been frequently read, following its title and epigraph, as the pivotal volume in Yeats's progress from a late nineteenth-century poetry of romantic mythologizing to the more urgent, chastising and self-chastising attitudes of public accountability to be read in his mid- and later period work. The poem ‘Among School Children’, to which I give considerable attention in this book, is one crucial exhibit of that later phase, originating, as it does, in the public responsibilities which Yeats assumed and dutifully performed as a senator of the recently created Irish Free State; originating, therefore, in the contingencies of contemporary social and political life but eventually including in its breathtakingly widening radius at least the possibility of aesthetic transcendence.

It was his admiration for Yeats's progress that, in the socially disintegrating American 1930s, impelled Delmore Schwartz to entitle a book in 1938, after Yeats's epigraph, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, signalling a certain strenuousness of social obligation. Frank O'Hara, on the other hand (whose in some ways surprising admiration for Yeats hums intermittently in his work, as does what he identifies in himself in ‘Homage to André Gide’ as ‘the windy course / of an almost Irish remorse’, which ‘insistently beckon[s] me elsewhere’), modifies Yeats's phrase in ‘Memorial Day, 1950’ with what seems a note of caustic challenge: ‘Our responsibilities’, he writes, ‘did not begin / in dreams, though they began in bed.’