Responsibilities, and Other Poems

Responsibilities, and Other Poems (1914) finds Yeats at a pivotal moment, and the title itself is a kind of defiance: a declaration that the poet cannot escape the weight of history, ancestry, and the Irish independence movement pressing upon him. The opening sequence meditates on what we inherit, not just bloodlines but debts to the dead, obligations to the living, the impossible burden of making art that matters. Here are poems that ache with the tension between the self Yeats wanted to be and the Ireland he could not stop writing toward. There are gorgeous lyrics about love and loss, sure-footed invocations of Irish myth, and the famous "A Prayer for My Daughter" that strange, dark, beautiful meditation on what it means to bring a child into a violent world. Throughout runs Yeats' conviction that poetry is a form of witness, that the poet must reckon with both the glorious and the terrible. Written in the years leading to the Easter Rising, these poems capture a nation in the act of becoming itself.