“This inexplicable war”. William Butler Yeats and his ‘Silence’ on the Great War

On the occasion of W. B. Yeats’s 150th birth anniversary and the First World War centenary, this paper aims at investigating the poet’s response to the tragedy of 1914-1918 by analysing his limited literary output related to the event. While “On Being Asked for a War Poem” is a short manifesto of his detachment, later poems dedicated to his friend Robert Gregory, killed in action, document a closer involvement, but a shifting attitude towards a war entangled with the complex Anglo-Irish question. Yeats’s reticence might also be read as a reaction to the increasing violence of politics, from which, as a public figure with an inclination for peace, he wanted to distance himself.