ABSTRACT
The friendship and love of women were essential to Yeats. His experience and knowledge followed the pattern of development that appears normal in the life of a Romantic poet; adoration, the taking fire of the mind at women's beauty; the recoil from disappointment and frustration into affairs that were unsatisfactory in varying degrees; a return to his idealized portrait, and a desperate attempt to rediscover it in the next generation; his marriage, and its overwhelming consequences in his philosophy; parenthood, and a certain stability; then (after the pattern of the lives of poets), a growing excitement and intensity as the imagination seized new significance in the elements which it could now combine. For as the physical realities receded, the images took on a continually sharpening edge: the gap between the extremes of sensuality and the spiritual, 'the intercourse of angels', widened as both became emphasized in the 'passionate coldness' that marks the later thought.
