After the publication of his book, The Wanderings of Oisin and theOther Poems in 1899 Yeats was keenly interested in the non-Englishcultures of the British Isles. It was known as the Celtic Twilight. In 1898he published a volume of essays called “The Celtic Twilight” containing anumber of folk stories.
In 1891 he founded the Irish Literary Society and worked on athree-volume edition of the poetry of Blake, which was published in 1893.Because of this involvement he pursued the study of symbolism, which isso important for his poetry. The evidence of this is to be found in his twovolumes of the decade, The Rose(1893) and The Wind Among theReeds(1899), with their many uses of the rose and other symbols. LadyGregory encouraged Yeats’s interest in folk-lores, visiting with him thehomes of her tenants and listening to their stories. She also encouragedhim to work for the theatre, which led him to the founding of the IrishNational Theatre Society in 1902.
In this way Yeats attempted to solve the two problems that werecentral to him as a public poet: the general problem of symbols inliterature in an age lacking a common tradition and the particularproblems presented by the confusions of the Irish situation. He wasimpelled to find a way of putting Ireland into some mental order, so thatcultural symbols of dependable significance would be at the disposal ofthe artist. In this context I read the two poems, “To the Rose Upon theRood of Time” and “The Song of Wandering Aengus” as the manifestationsof the Celtic, symbolic tradition of the Irish elite and the tradition of theIrish people respectively.
But in the 1890s and the early 1900s, for all his identification with the Gaelic ethos, a wistful hope remained for leadership from aregenerated landlord class. The Ireland that Yeats envisaged was a nationwith a distinctive cultural and spiritual identity, and he imagined acommunity free of sectarian differences and conflicts. That vision was notas revolutionary as some critics have supposed, and it hardly outlastedthe 1890s. A century later, however, we find an unusual amount ofinterest in his early writings.