The aspect of nationalism in W.B. Yeats's drama

Abstract

Throughout most of his literary career, Yeats was particularly sensitive to his role as an artist in colonial Ireland. As the above quote from his poem, Ego Dominus Tuus illustrates, he was realistically aware, that men of action rather than men of words carved a personal niche in the people's national consciousness. As a result, he had to fabricate new ways through which to deliver his message - his method was in withdrawing into compensatory fantasies of the heroic, thus, coming to value the sort of arcane knowledge beyond the reach of ordinary people. Yeats was in his early thirties (he was born near Dublin in 1865) when he joined the Irish dramatic movement and in London he became associated with the luminaries of the 1890's, founding the Rhymers Club with William Morris, Henley, Arthur Symons and Lionel Johnson. Oscar Wilde, Maeterlinck and Verlaine, whom he visited in 1894, also provided their inspiration to the young literary artist. At first he was not a nationalist; he was not a Catholic, but a Church or Ireland man, and his primary allegiance was to art instead of politics.