The Thirties: 'The day brings round the night'

It is useful to perceive Yeats as a ‘thirties’ poet. If the thirties were experienced as a growing crisis, Yeats certainly perceived Ireland to be partaking in the turmoil, and the way in which he explored, reacted to, and pushed back against this sense of a calamitous zeitgeist was fascinating, if idiosyncratic. His work offers a wilfully subjective and imaginative means of perceiving the world differently and gives us a greater stake in reality, suggesting why Yeats’s poetry might still be essential to us today—warts and all. The erosion of objectivity, the lack of checks upon our certitudes, leave us lacking proper measure in the midst of change. Poetry in the face of the world’s accelerating crises may well be like a mere fly upon the fast-moving surface of things. But Yeats’s work suggests that might not be nothing.