SOURCE: "The Anxiety of Masculinity," in Gender and History in Yeats's Love Poetry, Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 11-24.

In the following excerpt, Cullingford examines Yeats's personality and his love poetry, suggesting that Yeats possessed feminine qualities which enabled him to write untraditional poems in praise of the women he loved.

Love poetry, the discourse of sexuality in verse, is inflected by the gender of the subject position adopted by its author. In this respect Yeats's work is problematic. As an Irish nationalist poet he was expected to produce "manly" verse in order to counteract the colonial stero-type of the Irish as effeminate and childish. Yet he conceived of his poetic vocation as demanding a "feminine" receptivity and passivity, and as inheritor of an organic romantic poetic he saw the production of verse as analogous to the female labor of producing a child. "Man is a woman to his...