The popularity of the play had been evident from the very first performance when Yeats’s muse Maud Gonne played the part of Cathleen. She infused it with a nationalist fervour that was at times ...

including ‘Early Yeats, the Republican in a velvet jacket, writing dreamy love poetry for Maud Gonne; the more direct lyric poet, Middle Yeats, writing out of heartbreak and public life ...