W.B. Yeats

the long version

"This study shows how Yeats moved from a passionate identification with the idea of Ireland in his early work, through a period in which he re-emphasizes his Anglo-Irish inheritance and its difference from that of Catholics, to a new sense of unity in his later work, founded on a belief that the Gaelic and Anglo-Irish aristocracies were fundamentally alike. Effects of indecision and provisionality in the writing are bound up with his ambivalent sense of identity, as are aesthetic doctrines such as that of the Mask. Yeat's occult researches are seen as important for understanding the poetry and as possessing political significance. Other topics addressed include the concept of the nation, representations of gender, and Orientalism, as well as those questions of style and form which underlie the extraordinary esteem in which Yeat's poetry is still held by poets and readers of the twenty-first century."--From publisher description.