"I will hammer my thoughts into unity"

Yeats was always Yeats. He was always worried about the tragedy of aging, and wrote his first poem about this at the age of 21. He always struggled with the identity of Ireland and his own Irishness, and searched for a foundation for his country. But was it his country? He was Protestant, from the North, and moved in elite British circles for much of his life. Maybe that's why some of his most embattled poems are about violent events in the Irish struggle for independence and self-determination. At bottom, he searched for a basis on a more fundamental level, and this is what makes him a great poet, really. He looked for a mythology that would give structure to life, not just to the politics of day. Like Blake or Shelley, he decided to assemble his own mythology.

And his pet concerns - with beauty, with the godliness of men and women and their frailty, with the pain of unrequited love, the tragedy of lost things - run through his entire history. As a young poet, he set himself the task: "I will hammer my thoughts into unity." He had a vision, even as young man, of his own destiny, and it had something to do with unity. That meant the mystic goal, which he would later pursue with the Theosophists, of unifying the various parts and faculties of the mind and therefore evolving as a human being, it also meant finding a unifying principle for the world. I can't help but admire this ability to set a goal for himself of the highest order - and pursue it relentlessly. This single-mindedness is the mark of many extraordinary achievers.

Unity: Yeats set out to unify or ground Ireland, and then himself, and then the world. He began as a traditional, nationalist poet, then as a Romantic who sought to find the God in himself, and then as a modernist - but an optimistic one - who sought to reconstruct a fractured world. This quest took him to some strange places, and, over the course of looking at his life and influences, we'll have to ask whether he became a visionary - or whether he slipped off the deep end.