Reading Yeats; Yeats - biography and history; nationalism and the Anglo-Irish tradition; family; golden dawn and Celtic twilight; Maud Gonne and theatre business; independence struggle and civil war; maturity and old age; Yeats' themes and motifs; how themes are embodied in a poem; symbol and image; falcon, dove, swan; imagination and reality; house and tower; the anti-self or mask; Ireland, Byzantium and England; art, aristocracy and democracy; poet and people; the hero; beauty, woman, carnal knowledge; philosophers and dancers; folly and madness; unrequited love; age and bodily decrepitude; terror and apocalypse; Yeats' vision of history; the Gyres; Apollonian and Dionysian; repetition, shadow, archetype; Troy, Leda, Helen, Adam; death and rebirth; style; commentary - Meru; W.B.Yeats - a life and times.
