Chapter 3 - “O When Will It Suffice?”

Summary

Chapter 3, on Yeats’s middle period, begins with some reflections on his prose works that help explain his evolving ideas about art and personality, ideas that he formed in large part as the result of his friendship with John Synge. The logic of misrecognition, which in the early works animated his creation of both possible and impossible worlds, in mid-career works from Responsibilities (1914) to Michael Robartes and the “Dancer” (1921) tends to emphasize the the artist’s responsibility to the actual world from which he borrows to furnish his creations. The represented world of his work thus tends to dominate over the expressed world, but this does not prevent the latter from structuring reflections on history in a way that stresses the creative agency of the poet, driven by personality, the “shaping joy” of the artist. Personality enables a form of expressiveness in which the world of the work models new relations to (and alongside) historical time. It is central to Yeats’s worldmaking project and his relation to the actual world around him.