Collection: Responsibilities

Overview

Responsibilities (1914) marks a decisive turn in W. B. Yeats’s poetry from the dream-laden Celtic Twilight toward a harder, public, and self-scrutinizing voice. Issued by the Cuala Press and later expanded as Responsibilities and Other Poems (1916), the book is framed by the motto "In dreams begins responsibility", a gnomic challenge that threads through the volume. Yeats confronts the pressures of Irish civic life, the duty of the artist, and the costs of belief, giving up the ornate embroidery of his early manner for sharper edges, satire, and moral candor.

Historical and political setting

The poems stand in the wake of turbulent Irish events: the 1907 riot at the Abbey Theatre over Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, the 1913 Dublin Lockout, and public quarrels over Hugh Lane’s paintings and the Dublin Municipal Gallery. Yeats writes amid a disillusioned nationalism, haunted by the fall of Parnell and wearied by philistinism and faction. He is both implicated and embattled, as cultural leader at the Abbey, as public controversialist, and as private man, so the collection fuses the civic with the personal as few earlier volumes had done.

Themes

Responsibility is staged as a fourfold tension: the artist’s obligations to the polis, to tradition, to intimate truth, and to the self’s inward daimon. Yeats distrusts bourgeois virtue and sanctimony while courting an imaginal, aristocratic ideal of character. He pits the solitary maker against the crowd, yet longs for a real audience worthy of song. The poems test the difference between public reputation and inward integrity, lamenting how Ireland treats its heroes and its art. They also explore the aftershocks of love, age, and spiritual crisis, shifting from symbolic reverie to the stark heat of conscience and memory.

Style and form

The diction grows leaner and more idiomatic; lines tighten; rhetoric acquires bite. Satire and address become central weapons, as do ballad rhythms pared of ornament. Yeats favors strong openings, refrains, and aphoristic close, deploying masks and personae that allow him to praise, rebuke, confess, and prophesy in quick turns. Myth does not vanish, but it is retooled into emblem and edge rather than mist and moonlight. The result is a style prepared for his late, ferocious music.

Notable poems and moments

"September 1913" (published under a longer address in the volume) denounces shopkeeper morality and mourns the eclipse of heroic Ireland with the tolling refrain "Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone". "To a Shade" calls up Parnell’s ghost to reproach a nation that betrayed him, blending elegy with indictment. "The Fisherman" conjures an imagined reader, a solitary, just man of the people, through whom Yeats measures his own aims and failures. "A Coat" declares the poet’s refusal of his earlier embroidered style, choosing barer cloth over borrowed ornament. "The Scholars" skewers pedantry’s dry fuss against the living flame of song. "The Cold Heaven" flashes a vision of afterlife terror and the rending of self-illusions, while "The Magi" compresses occult yearning into a hard, iconic tableau. Elsewhere, "Paudeen" and "The Dolls" expose malice and triviality with grotesque clarity. Taken together, these poems alternate between public quarrel and distilled lyric, each sharpening the other.

Significance

Responsibilities is the hinge of Yeats’s career. It consolidates his public stance, tests his artistic vows against civic noise, and discovers a more tensile music capable of satire, confession, and praise. The volume’s mingling of political critique with spiritual and erotic self-examination becomes a template for the later masterpieces. Its motto names the book’s wager: that the dreamer, if he owns his dream, must also accept the burdens it imposes, on speech, on allegiance, and on the shape of the soul.