ABSTRACT
IN THE years after 1887 Yeats was strenuously engaged in what seem to the spectator incompatible activities. In 1888 the spiritualist in him joined the esoteric section of the Theosophic Society. Disagreements with Madame Blavatsky led to his resignation in 1890, but on 7 March of the same year he joined the Hermetic students of the Golden Dawn and, in 1893, was admitted to the inner circle of the Order. Meanwhile the Irish poet in him had founded the Irish Literary Society with John O'Leary's aid, on 24 March 1892. The man of action joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood. The scholar was involved with Edwin Ellis in a three-volume edition of Blake's works. The dramatist wrote The Land of Heart's Desire. The lover met Maud Gonne on 30January 1889, a meeting which he later said reverberated in his life like the sound of a Burmese gong in the middle of a tent. A strictly chronological account of his activities, Richard Ellmann comments, 'would give the impression of a man in frenzy, beating on every door in the hotel, in an attempt to find his own room'. It was not till many years later that Yeats found that every door he beat on led felicitously to the same room.
