A Changing Aesthetic

Yeats responded in his own way to the change in poetic taste represented in the poetry of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot immediately before World War I. A gift for epigram had already begun to emerge in his poetry; in the volume titled The Wild Swans at Coole (1919) he has a poem citing Walter Savage Landor and John Donne as masters. To the precision and the combination of colloquial and formal that he had achieved early in the century, he now added a "metaphysical" and epigrammatic element. He also continued his experiments with different kinds of rhythm and a search for a language of symbols. After Yeats married in 1917, his wife proved so sympathetic to his imaginative needs that the automatic writing which she produced for several years (believed by Yeats to have been dictated by spirits) gave him the elements of a symbolic system that he later worked out in his book A Vision (1925,1937) and that he used in all sorts of ways in his later poetry. The system was both a theory of the movements of history and a theory of the different types of personality, each movement and type being related in various complicated ways to a different phase of the moon.