Yeats’s Book of the Nineties: Poetry, Politics, and Rhetoric

Yeats’s Book of the Nineties is essentially a study of the major works Yeats produced at the height of that literary period known as the Decadence: his collection of short fiction, The Secret Rose; his 1899 volume of poetry, The Wind Among the Reeds; and the essay collection he titled Ideas of Good and Evil. But this is not a literary examination, per se; nor does it accept the traditional portrayal of the young Yeats as consummate aesthete. Instead, it argues for a reading of Yeats’s work in the context of his early efforts in journalism and his complex two-fold interest in Irish nationalism and occult spirituality. At this particular site, Myers suggests, matters of aesthetics and politics merge in what Yeats saw as a new propaganda for the political and cultural liberation of Ireland.