III.

Later Years

As Yeats grew older, he turned to practical politics, serving in the Senate of the new Irish Free State from 1922 to 1928. He also accomplished the feat, rare among poets, of deepening and perfecting his complex styles as the years advanced. His later writings are generally acknowledged to be his best. They were influenced by Georgie Hyde-Lees, his wife since 1917, who had a medium's gift for automated writing. A Vision (1925) is an elaborate attempt in prose to explain the mythology, symbolism, and philosophy that Yeats used in much of his work. It discusses the eternal opposites of objectivity and subjectivity, art and life, soul and body that are the basis of his philosophy. Other poetic works in this vein are The Wild Swans at Coole (1917), The Tower (1928), and The Winding Stair (1933).

Yeats also wrote short plays on the Celtic legendary hero Cuchulain, combined as Four Plays for Dancers (1921). They were strongly influenced by the nō drama of the Japanese court (see Japanese Drama), which was being translated in 1913 by the American poet Ezra Pound. Yeats's plays were designed more for small, appreciative audiences in aristocratic drawing rooms than for the middle-class public in commercial Dublin theaters. He derived much of his innovative technique, such as the use of ritual, masks, chorus, and dance, from the nō drama. In these plays Yeats brought poetry back to theater, from which it had long been absent, and fused strict realism with mythic vision to create poetic dramas as spare and pregnant with mysterious meaning as the images of a dream.

Continually revising his work, Yeats recounted episodes from his life in his Autobiographies (1927) and Dramatis Personae (1936). Two later collections are A Full Moon in March (1935) and Last Poems and Two Plays (1939). He received the Nobel Prize in 1923. Yeats died in Roquebrune, France, on January 18, 1939, and was buried in Sligo, Ireland.