A Coat
William Butler Yeats
Yeats aligned himself with his Irish heritage early on and it came to define his work. Equally staunch to his Irishness as he was to his identity as an artist, he was firm in his self-image and a willing martyr for his own poetry. He was driven by these characteristics, but also by his membership to the Golden Dawn, a secret society practicing the occult and ritual magic. Yeats’ artistic ambitions clashed with his occult ideas – he wanted to write work grounded in the physical world yet in private he concerned himself with visions of a higher plane. The resulting work exists in a state of conflict, he moves between symbolism of ordinary Irish life and occult and mystic ideas. In the end, Yeats saw the magic in his own country and the visions he saw were translated by the ground he walked on into something altogether unique.