ABSTRACT
In 1940, the year after Yeats’s death, Eliot told an audience at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin: ‘he was one of those few whose history is the history of their own time, who are part of the consciousness of an age which cannot be understood without them’ (Eliot 1975: 257). The reverse is also certainly true and Yeats’s writing should not be read outside of the context of Ireland’s political and colonial experience. More than any other twentieth-century poet, his work parallels a public history which for him was also a personal one. His poetry evolves alongside social upheaval and debates over national identity, as Yeats ‘the last Romantic’ becomes Yeats the modernist, nationalist, and post-colonial poet.
