ABSTRACT
W.B. Yeats imagined many different roles for art in society—but if there is one dream he dreamt most passionately, it was of an art that was integrated into the culture at large. He felt pinched by the boundaries of the minority culture in which so many poets of the fin de siècle lived. Unlike his English aesthete counterparts, though, he saw the tantalizing possibility of such an Irish nationalist audience, but this audience required the sacrifice of the poet’s autonomy. The centerpiece of this chapter is Yeats’s often-ignored decade-long project to create an “Order of Celtic Mysteries” that would combine aesthetic autonomy in poetic composition with Irish nationalism.
