The Paths of the Poet. Unravelling W. B. Yeats’s Per Amica Silentia Lunae

Much as the book has been in evidence among numerous critics, the present essay focuses exclusively on Yeats’s famous Per Amica Silentia Lunae (1918), seeking to investigate the impulses of faith and irony that underpin its construction. The book is discussed on four levels: as a prose poem, a treatise on poetry, an account of Yeats’s infatuation with Iseult Gonne and finally, as an elaboration of the theory of culture that Yeats pondered in his earlier critical and theoretical work. The readings overlap, as Yeats is shown to conceive of the life of the poet as a constant quest for self-reinvention that never gives up on the hope of its completion, at the same time remaining powerfully sceptical of the means to achieve that completion.