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>Surely human beings' "political practice" would then be itself accordingly >"complex"? One hopes so - but in practice it doesn't usually add up to the complexities of the poetry itself, and most often needs to ignore the poetry itself to make it fit. It's the yes/no, left/right, right/wrong (he's anti-democratic! sexist! racist! homophobic!) that bothers me. I'm not arguing against the political as such, but the suspect ease of fitting poetry (or poets) into ideologies. Say, the "ladders" of The Circus Animals Desertion being equated with the greasy political pole - surely more Jacob's ladder? Yeats turns specifically to the "heart", (Maybe at last, being but a broken man / I must be satisfied with my heart, although / Winter and summer till old age began / My circus animals were all on show...) This poem surely has more to do with his paradox that "nothing can be sole or whole / that has not first been rent". I see nothing utopian in his rag and bone shop: the opposite, rather, a rejection of earlier poses of purity, an acknowledgement of unacknowledged complicities (a realisation, perhaps, that the "'balloon of the mind' straining for release ... to cut its moorings with what grounds it has" is not possible.) Poetry is _not_ pure; the desire for purity, political or otherwise, is a tyranny neither poetry nor human beings can live with very well. Yeats is an interesting problem, precisely because in many ways he can be so easily criticised: and yet I can't but respond passionately to more than a few of those last poems. If they are to be discounted because his politics are "wrong", then politics are no sound arbiter of poems: or there is insufficient attention given to the stresses and fractures occuring within them, as if the human mind is a static and uncontradictory thing. Best Alison %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%