Nationalism and Nietzsche

It was Irish nationalism that first sent Yeats in search of a consistently simpler and more popular style. He tells in one of his autobiographical essays how he sought a style in which to express the elemental facts about Irish life and aspirations. This led him to the concrete image, in which "nothing...was abstract, nothing worn-out." Other forces were also working on him: in 1902 a friend gave him the works of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, to which he responded with great excitement. Nietzsche's books persuaded Yeats, the passive love-poet, to get off his knees and search for a more active stance and more masculine style. Looking back in 1906, he found that he had mistaken the poetic ideal. "Without knowing it, I had come to care for nothing but impersonal beauty....We should ascend out of common interests, the thoughts of the newspapers, of the market place, but only so far as we can carry the normal, passionate, reasoning self, the personality as a whole." The result of the abandonment of "impersonal beauty," and of the desire to "carry the normal, passionate, reasoning self" into his poetry, is seen in the volumes of collected poems, In the Seven Woods (1903) and The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910). "The Folly of Being Comforted" and "Adam's Curse" are from the first of these volumes, and one can see immediately how Yeats here combines the colloquial with the formal.