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Michael Robartes and the Dancer: Manuscript Materials
Published during the blossoming of Yeats's maturity, between The Wild Swans at Coole (1919) and The Tower (1928), Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1920) includes poems that confronted central political, personal, and philosophic issues. This volume presents all the extant manuscripts for the poems in the collection, which Yeats wrote between 1914 and 1919.
224 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1920
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About the author
W.B. Yeats
2,039 books2,575 followersWilliam Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and dramatist, and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years Yeats served as an Irish Senator for two terms. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival, and along with Lady Gregory and Edward Martyn founded the Abbey Theatre, serving as its chief during its early years. In 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for what the Nobel Committee described as "inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation." He was the first Irishman so honored. Yeats is generally considered one of the few writers who completed their greatest works after being awarded the Nobel Prize; such works include The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1929).
Yeats was born and educated in Dublin but spent his childhood in County Sligo. He studied poetry in his youth, and from an early age was fascinated by both Irish legends and the occult. Those topics feature in the first phase of his work, which lasted roughly until the turn of the century. His earliest volume of verse was published in 1889, and those slow paced and lyrical poems display debts to Edmund Spenser and Percy Bysshe Shelley, as well as to the Pre-Raphaelite poets. From 1900, Yeats' poetry grew more physical and realistic. He largely renounced the transcendental beliefs of his youth, though he remained preoccupied with physical and spiritual masks, as well as with cyclical theories of life.
--from Wikipedia
Yeats was born and educated in Dublin but spent his childhood in County Sligo. He studied poetry in his youth, and from an early age was fascinated by both Irish legends and the occult. Those topics feature in the first phase of his work, which lasted roughly until the turn of the century. His earliest volume of verse was published in 1889, and those slow paced and lyrical poems display debts to Edmund Spenser and Percy Bysshe Shelley, as well as to the Pre-Raphaelite poets. From 1900, Yeats' poetry grew more physical and realistic. He largely renounced the transcendental beliefs of his youth, though he remained preoccupied with physical and spiritual masks, as well as with cyclical theories of life.
--from Wikipedia
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
November 4, 2017
I feel a bit guilty giving this only three stars, because it contains the truly astonishing poem "The Second Coming", which has justly earned the accolades it's received since publication. The rest of the collection, however, did very little for me. I can see that some of the poems are put together well, and the overtly political ones are a bit more interesting than the rest, but other than "The Second Coming" there's not one that I'd be likely to bother reading again, to be honest.
November 12, 2020
Yeats opens the titular poem of this short collection with:
"He. Opinion is not worth a rush..."
Then Yeats ends this collection with 'To be carved on a Stone at Thoor Ballylee (quoted below in its entirety):
"I, the poet William Yeats,
With old mill boards and sea-green slates,
And smithy work from the Gort forge, Restored this tower for my wife George;
And may these characters remain When all is ruin once again?"
A man not be remembered forever ensures his wife will be. That isn't me. But I try.
"He. Opinion is not worth a rush..."
Then Yeats ends this collection with 'To be carved on a Stone at Thoor Ballylee (quoted below in its entirety):
"I, the poet William Yeats,
With old mill boards and sea-green slates,
And smithy work from the Gort forge, Restored this tower for my wife George;
And may these characters remain When all is ruin once again?"
A man not be remembered forever ensures his wife will be. That isn't me. But I try.
February 25, 2019
A collection of 13 poems from 1921. Highlights - "easter 1916" " the second coming" "a prayer for my daughter"
March 1, 2020
“The world has grown very wicked and there is no knowing what they might do to us or say to us’”
~ William Butler Yeats, The Player Queen
Underpinning the plays, prose, and poetry of William Butler Yeats is an ambiguity that is at once evocative and frightening. Novice literary critics charged with the task of excavating an implicit, concrete meaning may find it difficult, most especially because Yeats’s work is never, upon pain of academic death, to be read as allegorical. Published in 1921, Michael Robartes and the Dancer offers still more of the multifaceted, contradictory images and metaphors that have distinguished Yeats as one of the most profound and influential poets in the history of Irish literature. The work emerges during a period which seems, at least to Yeats, to be characterized by public horror and “personal joy” (Unterecker).
During the writing and publication of this volume, Yeats celebrates the entrances of his two children into the world, even as he rages at its ruination. This volume relies on a pattern of disorienting oppositions; external chaos and internal joy, death and “beauty,” (Yeats 193) “innocence” (Yeats 200) and corruption, death and birth, and “gaiety” and tragedy are mutually exclusive concepts which nonetheless function to instantiate Yeats vision of a “wicked and transitory system.
"Easter 1916," "The Second Coming," "Rose Tree," and “A Prayer for my Daughter offer depictions of despair, death, "blood,"(Yeats 200) and chaos. They are presented as extended metaphors for a diseased “world,” (Yeats 200) one which stands at the juncture of destruction and reformation. Bound inexorably for “a new, violent, bestial anti-civilization,” (Unterecker), their speakers are anxious, resigned, hopeful, lamenting. All stand in awe of the beauty before them, all stand in awe at the approaching “beast” (Yeats 200).
Heavily informed by the blood-soaked world of his vision, the volume is one of Yeats more frightening horror stories.
This story, however, begins not at an ominous twilight but near the promising dawn. A closer examination of the emotional and intellectual centers of these poems reveals not an inescapable night of terror but a dark poetic landscape shot through with persistent rays of light and optimism. As critic Laura Marvel observes, “Yeats seeks a dynamic synthesis of his contraries but the end sought is happiness rather than progression” (96).
Yeats’s dialectical vision culminates in an “utter” (193) “[transformation],” (193) one in which the individual alleviates the constricting mortal coil, escaping the limiting reality that is the perceptible world. William Butler Yeats’s Michael Robartes and the Dancer is a dynamic horror tale, one in which death and survival are mutually inclusive concepts.
Marvel, Laura. “Blake and Yeats: Visions of Apocalypse.” College Literature, vol. 13, no. 1, 1986, pp. 95–105. www.jstor.org/stable/25111689.
Yeats, William Butler. The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (Rev. 2nd Ed). Edited by Richard J. Finneran. 1983. Simon & Schuster Inc., 1996.
~ William Butler Yeats, The Player Queen
Underpinning the plays, prose, and poetry of William Butler Yeats is an ambiguity that is at once evocative and frightening. Novice literary critics charged with the task of excavating an implicit, concrete meaning may find it difficult, most especially because Yeats’s work is never, upon pain of academic death, to be read as allegorical. Published in 1921, Michael Robartes and the Dancer offers still more of the multifaceted, contradictory images and metaphors that have distinguished Yeats as one of the most profound and influential poets in the history of Irish literature. The work emerges during a period which seems, at least to Yeats, to be characterized by public horror and “personal joy” (Unterecker).
During the writing and publication of this volume, Yeats celebrates the entrances of his two children into the world, even as he rages at its ruination. This volume relies on a pattern of disorienting oppositions; external chaos and internal joy, death and “beauty,” (Yeats 193) “innocence” (Yeats 200) and corruption, death and birth, and “gaiety” and tragedy are mutually exclusive concepts which nonetheless function to instantiate Yeats vision of a “wicked and transitory system.
"Easter 1916," "The Second Coming," "Rose Tree," and “A Prayer for my Daughter offer depictions of despair, death, "blood,"(Yeats 200) and chaos. They are presented as extended metaphors for a diseased “world,” (Yeats 200) one which stands at the juncture of destruction and reformation. Bound inexorably for “a new, violent, bestial anti-civilization,” (Unterecker), their speakers are anxious, resigned, hopeful, lamenting. All stand in awe of the beauty before them, all stand in awe at the approaching “beast” (Yeats 200).
Heavily informed by the blood-soaked world of his vision, the volume is one of Yeats more frightening horror stories.
This story, however, begins not at an ominous twilight but near the promising dawn. A closer examination of the emotional and intellectual centers of these poems reveals not an inescapable night of terror but a dark poetic landscape shot through with persistent rays of light and optimism. As critic Laura Marvel observes, “Yeats seeks a dynamic synthesis of his contraries but the end sought is happiness rather than progression” (96).
Yeats’s dialectical vision culminates in an “utter” (193) “[transformation],” (193) one in which the individual alleviates the constricting mortal coil, escaping the limiting reality that is the perceptible world. William Butler Yeats’s Michael Robartes and the Dancer is a dynamic horror tale, one in which death and survival are mutually inclusive concepts.
Marvel, Laura. “Blake and Yeats: Visions of Apocalypse.” College Literature, vol. 13, no. 1, 1986, pp. 95–105. www.jstor.org/stable/25111689.
Yeats, William Butler. The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (Rev. 2nd Ed). Edited by Richard J. Finneran. 1983. Simon & Schuster Inc., 1996.
April 11, 2017
Strangely repetitive in the manner of his earlier works, but still a fair few great poems and lines. It's a weak 4 for me, but it's certainly still one of the top three collections of his to this point.
December 5, 2025
It's astonishing to think of this collection coming two years after Swans at Coole - how different! So, here we have two of the most excellent poems in the English language. But basically every poem here, short as it is, is an accomplishment.
May 24, 2013
The main work here is the oft-quoted "The Second Coming", but it feels like the odd poem out. Where "TSC" uses overtly Biblical imagery to evoke, distantly, a political theme, there are others that are fabricated dialogues between Irish political leaders, etc. So much more overtly political. There is some very personal material here as well, not just to Yeats's family but to his cause and nation as well, and it's this that represents the vast majority here.
(As an aside, something that partly undercuts the power of the opening line from "The Second Coming", "Turning and turning in the widening gyre", is the inclusion of "gyre" twice in the preceding poem. It probably serves a definite structural purpose, but I couldn't help imagining Yeats taking a sheet off his Word a Day Calendar, rubbing his chin and saying "Yes, I can stick that in a couple places, it sounds very...literary!")
(As an aside, something that partly undercuts the power of the opening line from "The Second Coming", "Turning and turning in the widening gyre", is the inclusion of "gyre" twice in the preceding poem. It probably serves a definite structural purpose, but I couldn't help imagining Yeats taking a sheet off his Word a Day Calendar, rubbing his chin and saying "Yes, I can stick that in a couple places, it sounds very...literary!")
August 10, 2019
It is different than the previous works of Yeats but similar somehow!
Really enjoyed The Second Coming!
Really enjoyed The Second Coming!
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
August 17, 2019
I just give it 4 stars because it was an impressive job he did with the free verse poetry and because The Second Coming is pretty powerful, not that I got too much out of the rest (mkay the one about the prayer for his daughter held me too).
Some of it, I think you probably need to be an English major to really dissect and understand.
Some of it, I think you probably need to be an English major to really dissect and understand.
July 15, 2014
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold
May 22, 2021
Read this alone in a stormnight in a desert house beach with no neighbors or human life or any sound beyond the buckets of rain and the wind near my house. Fucking unheimlich.
November 14, 2025
W.B. Yeats is squarely part of the canon of English literature, of course, but then when one goes and reads him, one finds out what an oddball he was, and particularly around 1921 when this collection was published.
A couple of the poems here come out of his more-than-dabbling in the occult with his wife. The system of the world they concocted, so wacky that it’s hard to believe it didn’t come out of drugs, is given a fictional backstory to lend it credibility: endnotes tell the reader that it descends from the ninth-century Arab learned man Kusta Ben Luka, the Judwalis tribe of the Bedouins, and nonexistent scholars Michael Roberts and Owen Ahearne. A century later, this sounds awfully silly and of its time, rather like H.P. Lovecraft’s attribution of his fictional grimoire, the Necronomicon, to the “Mad Arab” Abdul Alhazred. Yet among all the philosophizing that Yeats did during this era that no one really went for then or now, came one of his most-anthologized poems in “The Second Coming”:
How few readers today know the actual context of this poem, but its success with readers regardless does speak for a certain quality. But to make this collection even odder, is how the out-there occult poems were published with a number of poems on Irish political themes in the aftermath of the Easter Rising of 1916. One wonders how many of the readers around the world who are fond of “The Second Coming” are able to catch the name-dropping and draw pleasure from lines like:
Still, here and there I found enjoyment in this collection, particularly the title poem, a dialogue that contrasts book-learning with physical beauty as means to glimpse the infinite, and the quatrain “A Meditation in Time of War” that pithily expresses a similar metaphysics. “A Prayer for My Daughter” is deftly written as well, though society and culture has changed so much that some of Yeats’ wishes for his child may be utterly foreign to readers today.
A couple of the poems here come out of his more-than-dabbling in the occult with his wife. The system of the world they concocted, so wacky that it’s hard to believe it didn’t come out of drugs, is given a fictional backstory to lend it credibility: endnotes tell the reader that it descends from the ninth-century Arab learned man Kusta Ben Luka, the Judwalis tribe of the Bedouins, and nonexistent scholars Michael Roberts and Owen Ahearne. A century later, this sounds awfully silly and of its time, rather like H.P. Lovecraft’s attribution of his fictional grimoire, the Necronomicon, to the “Mad Arab” Abdul Alhazred. Yet among all the philosophizing that Yeats did during this era that no one really went for then or now, came one of his most-anthologized poems in “The Second Coming”:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity. […]
How few readers today know the actual context of this poem, but its success with readers regardless does speak for a certain quality. But to make this collection even odder, is how the out-there occult poems were published with a number of poems on Irish political themes in the aftermath of the Easter Rising of 1916. One wonders how many of the readers around the world who are fond of “The Second Coming” are able to catch the name-dropping and draw pleasure from lines like:
You say that we should still the land
Till Germany’s overcome;
But who is there to argue that
Now Pearse is deaf and dumb?
And is their logic to outweigh
MacDonagh’s bony thumb?
Still, here and there I found enjoyment in this collection, particularly the title poem, a dialogue that contrasts book-learning with physical beauty as means to glimpse the infinite, and the quatrain “A Meditation in Time of War” that pithily expresses a similar metaphysics. “A Prayer for My Daughter” is deftly written as well, though society and culture has changed so much that some of Yeats’ wishes for his child may be utterly foreign to readers today.
August 1, 2022
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
October 25, 2024
This book of 15 poems, includes the poem “Easter, 1916,” written on September 25, 1916, includes the oft-quoted refrain, “A terrible beauty is born.” This book was published in 1921, two years before Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature.
William Butler Yeats[a] (13 June 1865 – 28 January 1939) was an Irish poet, dramatist and writer, and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival, and along with Lady Gregory founded the Abbey Theatre, serving as its chief during its early years. He was awarded the 1923 Nobel Prize in Literature, and later served two terms as a Senator of the Irish Free State. Wikipedia
William Butler Yeats[a] (13 June 1865 – 28 January 1939) was an Irish poet, dramatist and writer, and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival, and along with Lady Gregory founded the Abbey Theatre, serving as its chief during its early years. He was awarded the 1923 Nobel Prize in Literature, and later served two terms as a Senator of the Irish Free State. Wikipedia
December 25, 2023
Do not think that because
I've been reading for years
I didn't like it. No, the pause
Was but a change of gears
Was it right to with a bright
and clear voice read aloud
each poem, for days, or night
in pursuit of some elusive insight?
Or was it that it slowed
me down? Each verse a shroud
I bought the tome for the Second
Coming but read all and also reckoned
with the Leaders of the Crowd.
All I read aloud.
The imagery that Michael Robartes
and the Dancer imparts
is hardly the one intended by
Yeats but what made sense to me
I've been reading for years
I didn't like it. No, the pause
Was but a change of gears
Was it right to with a bright
and clear voice read aloud
each poem, for days, or night
in pursuit of some elusive insight?
Or was it that it slowed
me down? Each verse a shroud
I bought the tome for the Second
Coming but read all and also reckoned
with the Leaders of the Crowd.
All I read aloud.
The imagery that Michael Robartes
and the Dancer imparts
is hardly the one intended by
Yeats but what made sense to me
May 21, 2022
5 stars because The Second Coming and Easter 1916 are masterpieces
September 16, 2025
for arrogance and hatred are the wares / peddled in the thoroughfares
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews