Poems Written in Discouragement 1912-1913

W. B. Yeats

Poems Written in Discouragement 1912-1913

Dundrum

The Cuala Press

1913

Inscribed: “[ ] by W. B. Yeats.” With Lady Gregory’s bookplate.

This slim pamphlet of only five poems contains the core of what would become Yeats’s more politically engaged 1914 volume, Responsibilities. “To A Friend Whose Work Has Come To Nothing” and “To A Wealthy Man, Who Promised A Second Subscription If It Were Proved The People Wanted Pictures” reference the failed effort to raise funds for Hugh Lane’s modern art gallery. Perhaps most noteworthy in the theme of failed effort and lost energy is the poem “September, 1913,” with its repeated refrain “Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone.” The struggle to bring Ireland into the modern cultural age had seemed stalled at that point in time, despite the successes that had been achieved.