ABSTRACT
When he was about twenty-one and under the influence of John O'Leary and the
Young Ireland Society, Yeats determined to write Irish poetry. By using Irish subjects and
a supposedly Irish medium, he hoped to write poetry that belonged to the Irish people,
from whom according to Yeats, it had long and unfortunately been divorced. As he wrote
years later in his Autobiography, incidentally indicating his first disagreement with Shelley,
I believed that if Morris had set his stories amid the scenery of his own Wales, for I knew him to be of Welsh extraction and supposed wrongly that he had spent his childhood there, that if Shelley had nailed his Prometheus, or some equal symbol, upon some Welsh or Scottish rock, their art would have entered more intimately, more microscopically, as it were, into our thought and given perhaps to modem poetry a breadth and stability like that of ancient poetry .1
