Yeats Believed in Irish Magic

AN UNCOMPROMISING CRAFTSMAN and moralist, Yeats can sound just like an angel as he judges like a priest. Among twentieth-century English-language poets, he was one of the best verbal musicians and one of the most likely to sneer—at “the sort now growing up/ All out of shape from toe to top,” and at “the commonest ear.” The latter condescension is from Yeats’s cultural complaints in “The Fisherman,” published months before Ireland’s Easter Rebellion would try to establish a nation whose culture Yeats thought was not as well-formed as it should have been. His concern was independence—not just sovereignty, but also cultural autonomy from the British who would govern his country for another half-decade. Yeats wanted a robust sense of Irish identity, which he couldn’t find in the culture he saw,