According to W. H. Auden, the minor poet may spend a lifetime writing similar poems, but the major poet “continues [to mature] until he dies so that, if confronted by two poems of his of equal merit but written at different times, the reader can immediately say which was written first.” Few poets measure up to Auden's standard more fully than Yeats, who never stopped searching for new ways to unify his fragmented experience. One turning point came at the end of the nineties, when instead of seeking to repeat his recent triumphs as a story writer and lyric poet, he set himself the fresh task of founding an Irish national theatre. The frustrations arising from this endeavor and from his failures with Gonne affected his work in ways that established important precedents for younger modernist writers. This chapter traces his evolution through his middle phase's culmination in Responsibilities and Other Poems (1916).

The Irish National Theatre

Yeats reacted to Gonne's confession of her affair with Millevoye by writing no lyric poems for nearly a year and a half. He took some solace, however, in his “spiritual marriage.” By 1901 and 1902 he was beginning to idealize a revised feminine archetype in such plays and poems as On Baile's Strand and “The Old Age of Queen Maeve,” which celebrate sexually assertive heroines rather than otherworldly virgins.