ABSTRACT
As Yeats himself described it in his journals (Foster, 1998) the ordinary man is ‘a bundle of accident and incoherence’: however, the poet who emerges from the struggle with words and images in a finished work is ‘something intended, complete’ (at least provisionally, we might add). He talked of a pursuit of ‘radiance’ being a central task, and I have paraphrased this to encompass something of the human task in the long and often painful journey on the path towards a more realistic sense of identity: what could be called ‘seeing the light’ about the self.
