ABSTRACT
‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’ is Yeats’s first full statement of what he took to be a complex and tragic situation: the position of artists and contemplatives in a world built for action, and their chances of escape, which are in effect two, the making of Images, and death. Yeats celebrates many times his rich friendship with Lady Gregory. “Infernally haughty” his father called her; but, he adds, “on the whole I am glad that Lady G. ‘got’ Willie”. On 8th February, having heard the news from Lady Gregory, he wrote to John Quinn: News will have reached you before this of Robert Gregory’s death in action. Of ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’ itself, it would be tedious to offer another explication; it has been well studied by Miss Witt and by Mr. Peter Ure in his Towards a Mythology.
