W.B. Yeats Exhibition

On Wednesday I popped into the National Library of Ireland to have a look around and ended up spending a good hour in the current exhibition on William Butler Yeats. It’s a brilliant exhibition blending creative multi-media presentations and personal affects of the world-renown poet/playwright. (Click here for an online presentation on Yeats poem “Sailing to Byantium.”)

One of the things that fascinates me the most about Yeats was his preoccupation with the spiritual realm, primarily in the form of the occult. One of the documentaries being shown in the exhibition mentioned that his search for the spiritual was in reaction to the ostensibly empty forms of religion and rationalism that he saw in the late nineteenth century. Of course, throughout Ireland’s history “religion” has always been inextricably linked to political agendas. For Yeats, there had to be something more. And if there was, it was certainly not found in Christianity. Interestingly enough, he turned to Celtic paganism instead.