SOURCE: "A General Introduction for My Work" (1937), in Essays and Introductions (reprint), Macmillan, 1961, pp. 509-26.

In the following excerpt, Yeats discusses the nature of his poetry and the influences of Celtic legend, his Irish heritage, and other poets on his work.

A poet writes always of his personal life, in his finest work out of its tragedy, whatever it be, remorse, lost love, or mere loneliness; he never speaks directly as to someone at the breakfast table, there is always a phantasmagoria. Dante and Milton had mythologies, Shakespeare the characters of English history or of traditional romance; even when the poet seems most himself, when he is Raleigh and gives potentates the lie, or Shelley 'a nerve o'er which do creep the else unfelt oppressions of this earth,' or Byron when 'the soul wears out the breast' as 'the sword outwears its sheath,' he is never...