Poetry and Politics.(W. B. Yeats: A Life)(Book Review)

The enduring echoes of Ireland's past, a daunting tangle of totems and taboos, make it a minefield for historians. Few know that better than R. F. Foster, a professor of Irish history at Oxford, who has forged a career exploding Ireland's myths. As both an Irishman and a Protestant, Foster is a natural choice to revise the traditional narrative of centuries of struggle against the British oppressor. That version of history aligned Irishness with the Roman Catholic faith, excluding the contributions of Protestants and damaging any hope of a pluralist Irish future. Now, in the second and final volume of his biography of W. B. Yeats--one of Ireland's most famous Protestants--Foster has rewritten history again.

"W. B. Yeats: A Life" (824 pages. Oxford University Press) is as much an introduction to the fraught history of Irish nationalism as a definitive life of Ireland's best-loved poet. Indeed, Yeats's emergence as a writer paralleled the push for Irish nationhood. A member of the Protestant landowning elite who spent many years living in England, Yeats saw the privileges of his class unravel during his childhood. In the first volume of his biography, published six years ago, Foster details Yeats's struggle to promote an Irish culture that was common to both faiths, interviewing peasants about their pagan beliefs and folk tales.

Foster's chronological approach may appear pedestrian, but ...