Republishing: The Public World of WB Yeats' Poetry

Born on this day, in 1865, Yeats was the foremost Irish poet who opposed democracy. Here's a look at his poetry and politics.

In an age that is witnessing its poetry -- the noblest product of an imaginative mind -- mainly reduced to Facebook and Instagram posts, it is difficult to percieve how the present state of poetry characterised by excess and degradation would have seemed to readers of earlier centuries. The poetry of preceding centuries had vitality, profoundness of tho…