Per Amica Silentia Lunae

This slim, strange volume emerged from the autumn of 1919, as Yeats moved through an Ireland being remade by war and revolution. Written in the aftermath of the Easter Rising and amid the chaos of the First World War's end, it represents Yeats at his most personally philosophical - not the public poet of national awakening, but the private thinker wrestling with the artist's place in a world tearing itself apart. The title, borrowed from Virgil, evokes "the friendly silence of the moon" - that liminal space where the mind moves between waking thought and deeper knowing. Through essay and fragment, Yeats examines the artist's solitude, the struggle to create meaningful work amid social collapse, and the mystical traditions that might anchor the self. He draws on the occult, on history, on his own creative crisis. The book reads like a man thinking aloud, searching for solid ground. For readers of Yeats's poetry, it offers a window into the mind behind the myth. It endures because it captures something universal: the terror and necessity of withdrawal, the artist's eternal negotiation between solitude and engagement with the world.