Ireland are in his poetry,
Irish folk-lore is there, and the look of the country; and a man moulded
as only Irish conditions, of old time and of to-day, could mould him,
Irish conditions spiritual, intellectual, and physical; a man with eyes
on a bare countryside in the gray of twilight, thinking of the stories
the peasants tell and of the old legends whose setting this is before
him. At this hour, with such surroundings, and in such thought, the
Other World is as near to all men as their natures will let it come, and
to Mr. Yeats it is very near. Waking dreams come to him at such hours,
and he puts them into his verse, waking dreams of his country's
legendary past and of its fairy present, and waking dreams born of books
of old magic he has read indoors. Now it will be one sort of dream is
present, now the other, and now the third, and often two or even all
three sorts of dream are intermingled. His volume of prose sketches,
"The Celtic Twilight" (1893), gives the title some of his countrymen
have fastened on his verse, and the verse of others that take his
attitude and use like material, "The Twilight School of Poetry." It is
not inapt as giving the quality of most of his writing; but some of his
verses have warm sunlight in them, which, strangely, since it is
sunlight as it visits Irish shore and mountain, he has deplored. The
explanation may be that Mr. Yeats is of those who do not live intensely
until the oncoming of night, and so holds out of harmony with his genius
the coloring of its moments of lesser energy.

Legends and folk-tales and landscapes and books of mysticism and magic
not only give Mr. Yeats the material of his poetry, but suggest its
images, its color, and in part its rhythms; but before he found the
"faint and nervous" rhythms best fitted to his poetry, and put in it the
gray-greens and browns and soft purples and bright whites of Irish
landscape, and the symbols from fairy-lore and mythology, he had paid
patient heed to certain of the great poets of his language, to Spenser
and Blake, to Shelley and William Morris. And in learning the art of
drama, which he began to study very carefully after his early plays were
tested in "The Irish Literary Theatre," Mr. Yeats has very evidently
pondered a good deal on the English morality and taken into account the
effects of Greek tragedy as he had before explored M. Maeterlinck and
the earlier Ibsen.

As a boy Mr. Yeats wrote in the "Dublin University Revie