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From 1903 on, however, William Butler Yeats experienced the truth of his dictum that "consciousness is conflict": his ideals were thwarted by a world of contrary facts. In 1903, Maud Gonne married the nationalist Major John MacBride, an event beyond the reach even of Yeats's lyric melancholy. The National Theatre encountered bitter opposition from its nationalist Catholic audience, outraged (1907) by The Playboy of the Western World of John Millington Synge's Middle-class Dublin earned Yeats's satiric contempt for its graceless treatment of Hugh Lane's bequest (1913) of paintings to the city. Such concerns crowd Responsibilities (1914) with the angry, exhilarated accents of a man whose life and poetic style have undergone radical change. Prompted by the colloquial energies of Synge's verse (1909) and encouraged by his friendship (from 1912) with Ezra Pound, this toughening of style broke the grip of earlier romantic and Pre-Raphaelite influences on William Butler Yeats. With No theater as a model, Pound also influenced the refinement of Yeats's drama (Plays for Dancers, 1916).

In 1917, Yeats married Georgiana Hyde-Lees. Between 1917 and 1920 her automatic writing and speech gave Yeats the raw material for A Vision (1925; rev. ed., 1937), the work that crowned his pursuit of mystical knowledge. Its "stylistic arrangements of experience" provide a systematic geometry of human life--part history, part philosophy, part mysticism, part psychology, but wholly Yeats. Contributing to the "power and self-possession" of the dense, symbolic poems in The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair (1933), A Vision provides useful insights into much of the poetry. The titles of the two volumes of poetry refer to Thoor Ballylee in County Galway, a Norman fortification acquired by Yeats in 1917. Lived in for some summers, it became, like so many of the facts of his life, a cluster of symbols in his poetry.

Two events confirmed Yeats's dual role as poet and public man. In 1922, at the end of the Anglo-Irish war (1916-22), he became a senator of the Irish Free State. In 1923 he received the Nobel Prize for literature.