William Butler Yeats, at the age of seventy-three, stands well
within the company of the great poets. He is still writing, and
the poems which now appear, usually embedded in short plays or
set into the commentary and prefaces which have been another
preoccupation of his later years, are, in many instances, as
vigorous and as subtle as the poems written by him during the
years ordinarily considered to be the period of a poet's
maturity. Yeats has advanced into age with his art strengthened
by a long battle which had as its object a literature written by
Irishmen fit to take its place among the noble literatures of
the world. The spectacle of a poet's work invigorated by his
lifelong struggle against the artistic inertia of his nation is
one that would shed strong light into any era. The phenomenon of
a poet who enjoys continued development into the beginning of
old age is in itself rare. Goethe, Sophocles, and, in a lesser
degree, Milton come to mind as men whose last works burned with
the gathered fuel of th