The Happiest of the Poets

W. B. Yeats’s association with the English designer, poet, and socialist William Morris lasted from 1887 to 1890, during which time the young Irish poet attended Sunday lectures Morris delivered to a group of mostly self-educated workingmen and would-be revolutionaries in Hammersmith, West London. Morris’s influence on Yeats took many forms, including both poetics (the heroic setting of Yeats’s 1899 book-length poem The Wanderings of Oisin is indebted to him, as are the long lines of its final section) and social vision. (Morris introduced Yeats to the writings of Ruskin and Carlyle—the former of whom Yeats would credit, decades later, in his reactionary pamphlet On The Boiler, for having first set him at odds with his father’s Liberalism.) Over time, though, Yeats’s interest tapered off. As he would later write in his Memoirs, “As the months passed I became less of a socialist.”