e for the
psaltery, and in 1902 he was determined to write all his shorter poems
for recitation to this instrument and "all his longer poems for the
stage."

Mr. Yeats was thirty-four when he practically gave up lyrical poetry for
dramatic poetry. From the beginning he had written plays, but they were
lyrical plays, dramatic only in form, and they were, as soon as he had
mastered the technique of verse, great lyrical poems. In the plays he
has written since he has striven at that hardest of literary tasks, to
make true dramatic speech high poetry, he has written nothing more
beautiful than "The Countess Cathleen" and "The Land of Heart's Desire."
He has rewritten and rewritten these later plays, and in almost every
rewriting made them more dramatic, but sometimes the later versions have
lost as poetry, not in the mere decorative features and "lyrical
interbreathings," but in the accent of the play and in the sheer
poetical qualities. To me it seems a pity, inevitable though it be, that
the poet who has struck the most distinctly new note of all the English
poets since Swinburne should, at thirty-four, have changed from an art
he knew to an art he did not know. That is a ripe age for a poet to
begin to learn to write in a form barely essayed before. Unlike so many
of the English poets, who as public school boys were bred up to write
verse, Mr. Yeats had to teach himself to write verse. Overcoming
triumphantly this handicap, though losing by it years usually fullest of
impulse to write, Mr. Yeats greatly attained, and for the ten years from
1889 to 1899 devoted himself to the writing of lyrics. For the past
thirteen years he has been busiest with dramas, in none of which has he
more than approximated to a dramatic quality that is as great as the
quality of his lyrics. He has owned himself one reason of such
shortcoming, in the notes to "Deirdre."[2] "The principal difficulty
with the form of dramatic literature I have adopted is that, unlike the
loose Elizabethan form, it continually forces one by its rigour of logic
away from one's capacities, experiences, and desires, until, if one have
not patience to wait for the mood, or to rewrite again and again till it
comes, there is rhetoric and logic and dry circumstance where there
should be life."

It may be that Mr. Yeats will one day overcome the difficulties that he
alludes to here, but he is now forty-seven, and I, for one, doubt if, at
his age, he can overcome them. As