Yeats as a Philosopher

Abstract

My subject could, with the title I have chosen, be a large one: it could be the subject of Yeats’s whole view of life…. I want to discuss mainly the series of fascinating letters which Yeats exchanged, over a period of six years, with his close friend, the poet and artist, Sturge Moore. Yeats’s philosophy explains one great quality of many of his poems and of the portraits of his friends in the “Autobiographies.” These portraits seem timeless; and there is a sense in which Yeats, like Shakespeare, accepts human nature for what it is, with reverence and wonder — with a total absence of conventional social or moral criticism. He never, as he might about Lionel Johnson or Dowson or Wilde, says: “What a waste!” His actors are “all spirits” and by and by they will vanish into “air, into thin air.” That spirit should manifest itself at all in limited forms is both wonderful and comic; it is tragic that its manifestations should vanish: “Man is in love and loves what vanishes,/ What more is there to say?”