SOURCE: "Yeats on Poetry and Politics," in The Midwest Quarterly, Vol. XXV, No. 1, Autumn 1983, pp. 64-73.

In the following excerpt, O'Neill suggests that Yeats's poetical interpretation of political events evolved from bitterness to acceptance as Yeats tried to impose order on chaos by applying the theories of historical cycles which he explains in his collection of poems entitled A Vision.

William Butler Yeats came of age during the Parnell era, a time of great political excitement in Ireland. By the mid-eighties Charles Stuart Parnell and his supporters had, by obstructionist tactics, forced the issue of home rule upon the English Parliament. Seven hundred years of English presence in Ireland seemed about to end. Then Captain O'Shea filed his famous suit for divorce, naming Parnell as corespondent. The tragi-comic debacle that brought Parnell to defeat and ended, for the time, all hope of home rule, was treated, in Yeats's...