Yeats’s Transgressive Dancers

The work of W. B. Yeats traces a long arc. Over the course of his life, which extended through the late Victorian and Edwardian periods, the early years of the twentieth century, the Great War in Europe and revolution in Ireland, the high modernist 1920s, and the urgent 1930s, the style of Yeats’s poetry and drama also shift radically, from early, sinuous Celtic-Twilit lyrics to harsh, emotionally uncomfortable work made when Europe slouched towards the Second World War. Some impulses are constant throughout his long and restless career, however. One of these is certainly a commitment to the idea of art, and within that, the notion of performance. For Yeats, to be human was to be in a constant state of longing: “a hunger for the apple on the bough/Most out of reach,” as he puts it in the poem “Ego Dominus Tuus.” This yearning for fullness cannot be satisfied, or arguably even understood, but it may be expressed in words or action—and to a large degree, in Yeats, words are action. It is hard to overstate the importance of performance and performativity for understanding him.