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Despite illness and old age, William Butler Yeats' last 15 years or so bristled with astonishing energies. True to the principles of a lifetime, he refused to abandon the attempt to bend the world and himself to his imaginative pattern. One regrettable result of this ambition was his approval during the 1930s of the social and political tenets of fascism. Consonant with his abiding conception of reality as a struggle between Blakean "contrarieties" of chaos and design, and responsive to his apocalyptic vision of a universal descent into barbarous ruin--prophesied in "The Second Coming," 1920--the flaw in this unfortunate allegiance lies in the blunt literalism with which William Butler Yeats applied his aesthetic principles to the world of politics.

Happily his creative energies, if uneven, were undiminished. He published Essays (1924), Collected Plays (1934), and volumes of poetry. His completed Autobiographies appeared in 1938, giving the definitive, wished-for lineaments to his own identity. His idiosyncratic and controversial edition of The Oxford Book of Modern Verse came out in 1936, and later plays and Last Poems were published posthumously in 1939. In 1934 he underwent the Steinach operation (a procedure that stimulates the production of sexual hormones), which, he believed, rejuvenated his flagging creativity and stimulated the intensely sexual themes and imagery of many of the late poems. His final play, The Death of Cuchulain, and his last two poems, all dealing with heroic resolution in the face of death, were completed only days before he died.

This willed coincidence between his life and work guarantees Yeats's stature as the greatest modern poet in the English language. His life is a spectacular series of revisions and "re-makings" of the self; its accidents he repeatedly translated into the permanences of art, his own history into myth. At 19 years of age, "he lived, breathed, ate, drank and slept poetry." In his last letter he wrote, "Man can embody truth but he cannot know it. . . . You can refute Hegel, but not the Saint or the Song of Sixpence." Sanctity and poetry were the embodiments of truth. Yeats successfully staked his life on the second: his poetry embodies the truth of his life. As if to carry this truth beyond the grave (he was reinterred in Sligo in 1948), the words on his tombstone are the last words in his Collected Poems: "Cast a cold eye/On life, on death./Horseman, pass by!" --Eamon Grennan