"W.B. Yeats, widely regarded as the greatest English-language poet of the twentieth century, believed that the life of a lyric poet was an experiment in living that should be told. This new critical biography seeks to tell that story as it unfolded in the various contexts in which Yeats worked as an artist and public figure.

It considers a career that began in the late Victorian world of 1880s and 1890s London, which involved a deep commitment to the life of an emergent Ireland in the twentieth century, disillusionment and the alienation from the modern world."--BOOK JACKET.

"A central focus of this study is Yeat's perennial pursuit of sacral power which he saw as being vested in traditional institutions. It examines how at various stages of his life he sought to acquire this power for himself in such 'institutions' as a magical order, a nation, a theatre, the community of the dead, and climatically, an occult marriage.

The concluding stages of the book assess Yeat's final years as a crisis of that faith in institutions, which had hitherto sustained him in all he attempted."--BOOK JACKET. "In this book all Yeat's major works as poet and dramatist are considered in the contexts in which they came to be written and published."--BOOK JACKET.