3. The Seeker

Yeats’s lifelong pursuit of the spiritual, of transcendent knowledge associated with various Otherworlds, at first the Celtic Fairyland, later ‘Byzantium,’ his city of spirit and art. But that quest is complicated by the ambivalence of a man and poet always acutely conscious of the cost and dangers of estrangement from the tangible realities of human life and love. Hence the tension between the material and the spiritual realms, culminating not only in the two Byzantium poems but in the major dialectical poems of the mature Yeats, ‘Vacillation’ and ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul.’ That tension is here examined in such early poems as ‘The Stolen Child,’ ‘The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland,’ ‘To the Rose upon the Rood of Time,’ and ‘Who Goes with Fergus?’