Contemporary scholarship about W.B. Yeats (1865-1939) is increasingly clear about the implications of his being a nationalist from a Protestant background. He always felt a degree of distance from his Catholic compatriots, while at the same time believing that his own background offered him relative freedom to interpret Ireland's pre-Christian traditions and mythology. This study shows how Yeats moved from passionate identification with the idea of Ireland in his early work, through a period in which he reemphasizes his Anglo-Irish inheritance and its difference from that of Catholics, to a...