Women in Yeats’s Poetry

Abstract

‘Women’, Yeats wrote in an unpublished account of his early twenties in London, ‘filled me with curiosity, and my mind seemed never to escape from the disturbances of my senses’¹ He had many women friends on whom he used to call to discuss ideas he could not bring to a man without meeting some competing thought, but apart from these intimate intellectual exchanges he was timid and abashed.² Yet that curiosity and that disturbance of his senses lasted throughout his life, and much of his finest poetry is concerned with matters of love, with the heart-mysteries of his own life.