Preliminary Examination of the Script of E[lizabeth] R[adcliffe]

Abstract

Critics generally recognize that the years immediately prior to the First World War were crucial to Yeats’s development. This was the period, culminating in 1914 with Responsibilities, when his style changed, when he moved, as he himself variously described it, from a lunar to a solar influence,¹ from a feminine to a masculine mode, from poetry written for the eye to poetry written for the ear. This change was not a matter of caprice: it stemmed in large part from a conviction that had grown steadily throughout the first decade of the century, that his youthful optimism had been misplaced and that he was out of step with the world in which he found himself.