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Gregory, the son of his collaborator-patron Lady Augusta Gregory, who died in
servicein the Royal Irish Air Corps in Italy early in 1918. As the speaking character
of ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’, Gregory notably disclaims any imaginative
part in the campaigns or causes that will have eventuated in his death. He takes
the occasion instead as incentive for acts that locate a significance of entirely
personal and private type, as some forerunner of Hemingway’s twentieth-century,
existentialist hero:

Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,

Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,

A lonely impulse of delight

Drove to this tumult in the clouds.^24

And in the more formally explicit elegy, the Spenserian eclogue of ‘In Memory
of Major Robert Gregory’, there is virtually no specificity of location or context
for the title-subject’s demise. Were it not for the beauty of the representations,
or perhaps through the very beauty, one might read a nearly pathological aplomb
in the feigned but wilful ignorance of actual circumstance and history, say, in
objecting that ‘Our Sidney and our perfect man|Could share in that discourtesy
of death’.^25 The strained polity here echoes to the language of the Georgian poets
in the opening moments of the war, when a vocabulary of classical pastoral was
elaborated as an illusion screen on the emergent horror of modern atrocity. Denial
of the same kind appears as the motive and aim of Yeats’s own poetic idiolect
here.
Acknowledging of course the validity and primacy of Yeats’s Irish commitments,
one may read his resistance to admit the major significance of this World War
as one measure of the very immensity of that development. The landmark work
of poetic imagination that Yeats started to consider in 1917,A Vision, revels in
the dimensionality of this unprecedented event of World War. A model of world
history that is based upon periodic crisis and conflagration, imaging a framework
of historical action on the grandest scale of cosmic years and universal types, it
draws the force of catastrophic gigantism from the close spectre of total war and
its unprecedented destruction. The horrific extremity of the day-by-day events on
the Continent, some of their colossal novelty and atrocity, shows in the schemes
and tropes of grandiose disaster in the prose book, in the rhetoric and emphases of
breathless sublimity in the poetry it helps to generate:

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,

(^24) W. B. Yeats, ‘An Irish Airman Foresees his Death’, inThe Poems, ed. Daniel Albright (London:
Dent, 1990), 184.
(^25) Yeats, ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’, ibid. 182.