Of modern writers in English, none has been involved in so many disparate public activities as Yeats. The image of him, partly promoted by himself, as a detached figure, a poetic seer in a remote tower, proves totally inadequate in this scrutiny of the detail of his life. He had remarkable gifts as an organiser and manipulator of committees and was an adroit controversialist.

More than most writers he pulls a contemporaneous context into his work and, particularly in relation to Ireland, his work impinges on and sometimes shifts the context.

This literary life seeks to question another image of Yeats as a comfortable, affluent, quasi-aristocratic figure and suggests that the heroic elevation of friends, the laudation of the graciousness of the Big House and the spiritual stasis of Byzantium, stem, in part, from a disrupted childhood and a fear of insecurity. Yeats, the most ambitious of modern poets, was deeply aware of the hollowness of much of his apparent success and it was his very awareness that forced him on in his writing.

Each chapter of Alasdair Macrae's study of the writer seeks to locate him in relation to the main movements and ideas which influenced his work and to which he responded in a unique way.