for a poet to begin to learn to write in a form barely essayed before. Unlike so many of the English poets, who as public school boys were bred up to write verse, Mr. Yeats had to teach himself to write verse. Overcoming triumphantly this handicap, though losing by it years usually fullest of impulse to write, Mr. Yeats greatly attained, and for the ten years from 1889 to 1899 devoted himself to the writing of lyrics. For the past thirteen years he has been busiest with dramas, in none of which has he more than approximated to a dramatic quality that is as great as the quality of his lyrics. He has owned himself one reason of such shortcoming, in the notes to "Deirdre."[1] "The principal difficulty with the form of dramatic literature I have adopted is that, unlike the loose Elizabethan form, it continually forces one by its rigour of logic away from one's capacities, experiences, and desires, until, if one have not patience to wait for the mood, or to rewrite again and again till it comes, there is rhetoric and logic and dry circumstance where there should be life."
It may be that Mr. Yeats will one day overcome the difficulties that he alludes to here, but he is now forty-seven, and I, for one, doubt if, at his age, he can overcome them. As they are, his plays are beautiful in ideas and words, and striking in a lyric and decorative way, if not all of them in a dramatic way, though in some he has in vain sacrificed poetry to attain true dramatic speech attaining instead only "rhetoric and logic and dry circumstance." One values the plays of Mr. Yeats highest
- ↑ Collected Works. Stratford-on-Avon, 1908, vol. II, p. 251
