General Prologue

Yeats’s mingling of the erotic and the spiritual, ‘sex and the dead.’ The centrality of his debate-poem, ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul.’ The tension between the objective (the primary) and the subjective (the antithetical). My focus, in both parts of the book, on close reading of selected poems. Analysis of ‘Michael Robartes and the Dancer’; its thematic emphasis on the thinking of the body. Introduction to Maud Gonne, and Yeats’s poems to and about her.