The Human Image in Yeats

Reading Yeats we find a poet intensely and often painfully preoccupied with the irreconcilable claims of Soul and Body: ‘body and soul/Estranged amid the strangeness of themselves’. Intensely and painfully, because being a poet he was driven toward images of ‘wholeness’, unity, and ‘perfection’. There seemed no possibility of realizing ‘Unity of Being’; the poetic [...]