W B Yeats: a life (volume II: the arch-poet) R F Foster Oxford University Press, 798pp, £30 ISBN 0198184654

W B Yeats's poetry of the 1890s, lovelorn and longing for Ireland, inspired by its folklore and its desolate landscapes, lived on into the 1960s. For most Irish readers, including my parents, the late poems seemed puzzling, full of stark and astonishing phrases, but almost an aberration compared to the soft beauty of his early work. The facts of his life were clear, as his poems had made them clear. He was born in 1865 and spent a great deal of time as a child in Sligo, in the west of Ireland. Like certain members of his class - he was an Irish Protestant - he became a nationalist at the end of the 19th century. He was in love with the beautiful Maud Gonne, who rejected him. With Lady Gregory and John Millington Synge, he founded the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. Eventually, he married an Englishwoman, had two children and lived much of the time in a castle in County Galway. He died in 1939.

For anyone growing up in Ireland who loved words and phrases, his poems were memorable and often quoted. "The Stolen Child" or "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" or "When you are old" could have been folk songs, they were so much part of the culture. Had he died in 1895, with just two books of verse published, two plays and a few essays written, he could have been the lost poet Ireland would have taken to its heart. Instead, he has become a difficult and ambiguous presence for us now; the levels of his restlessness and ambition, his own complex heritage, the sheer quality of his achievement as a writer and his skill at embracing and embodying opposing forces make his life seem, despite the mistakes and the foolishness, one of the greatest, or at least one of the most energetic and forceful, ever lived. We move in his shadow; at times it darkens and changes its shape, but it is never absent.

He was, like Henry James, lucky to have a father who did not believe in money or commerce or worldly success. Neither John Butler Yeats nor Henry James Sr recovered from arriving at this state of non-belief, which took the form of occasional wisdom, a superb epistolary style, great restlessness and an inability to finish anything much. Each father produced two sons who were geniuses (Jack Yeats was a great painter, as William James was a great prose stylist and psychologist), who determined to finish everything, and one very clever and unhappy unmarried daughter with an acid tongue. Yet anyone searching for Freudian undertones or meanings in the life of Yeats would miss the point. For him, introspection and all forms of self-examination arose from power and were, in themselves, a sort of power. He sought power over words, over committees, over his own heritage and his own transformation, over other writers, over his father, over images and meanings, over history and also, through his work with magic, over destiny. Michel Foucault would have had a field day with him.

W B Yeats took pride in his friends, each one selected without cold intention, but with an astute interest in how they might help his cause. It is possible that Synge's gnarled vision, the sharpness of his style, affected Yeats as deeply in the early years of the century as did Ezra Pound ten years later. It is also possible that he loved a number of intelligent Englishwomen as much as he was ever captivated by Maud Gonne. His friendship with Augusta Gregory, perhaps the cleverest and wisest woman of the age, was one of the great gifts offered to him that he fully accepted and took advantage of. Like many Irish people, he loved London.

He wrote poetry and plays and autobiography and essays and letters. It is the poetry which matters most (and there is a great deal of superb poetry in the plays), and this springs from an astonishing talent for phrase-making, for the forming of stanzas and the creation of voices and tones both rich and stark, managing exquisite certainties in a time when that seemed no longer possible.

How should the biography of Yeats be written? The Irish historian Roy Foster has his own set of varied tones; indeed, some of his own essays are as commanding, and opinionated, as any that Yeats ever managed. His Modern Ireland 1600-1972, published in 1988, offered a careful, tentative and nuanced version of complex facts and displayed an ability to make considered judgements, while refusing to provide an easy narrative shape where there had been chaos and inconclusion.

His Yeats is thus allowed to be four different individuals on the same day: a theosophist, a floppy-haired poet, an Irish nationalist, a social lion in London. Yeats was happiest, as Elizabeth Bowen claimed she was, too, on the Irish sea. He was unsure, however, which way he wished to face and delighted at the uncertainty, which he saw as energy. Foster allows him to change, just as Ireland changed, and be foolish, just as Ireland and indeed England were foolish. Foster gives Yeats's movements, his friendships and the historical background their due place in a narrative that is readable and engaging without losing sight, as most biographers do, of the strange, accidental and shapeless nature of life itself. Yeats is also allowed to emerge from these pages in all his power; his steely sense of direction and the completeness of his being, despite all the flux and Celtic mists, are offered to us as a novelist might offer a great and dynamic invention.

The years dealt with in this, the second volume of the biogra-phy, from 1915 to Yeats's death, offer serious problems to the biographer. Bravely, Foster largely dismisses Yeats's book A Vision, refusing to be seduced by it, agreeing that much of this work was a waste of time. He is at his most nuanced and careful, on the other hand, when dealing with Yeats's politics, making clear their importance for certain poems and their centrality in his work, weaving this story with great deftness through years of fierce activity and much personal transformation. This is the definitive account of a matter on which there has been much debate. Foster makes no effort to explain away Yeats's interest in right-wing ideologies; but nothing here is simple, and his version of things cannot be summarised.

Foster writes superbly here about the poems,including not only basic biographical background, but dealing also with matters of diction and rhythm. This did not interest him as much in the first volume, perhaps because the early poetry did not interest him as much. His account of the two Byzantium poems is masterly and illuminating; the second of these, "Byzantium", is surely the most mysterious of all Yeats's poems, drum sounds beating against whispers, a highly wrought rhetoric with flat, fierce rhythms and a magisterial rhyme scheme.

In the years when he was writing these poems, Yeats was thinking not only of power but of sex. He would, most famously, not lie down into old age. Foster writes about the connections between his erotic life and his interest in magic, and his relationship with George Hyde Lees, a deeply intelligent and practical woman, also steeped in theosophy, whom he married in 1917. Foster uses the same serious, judicious tone when writing about Yeats's love life as when writing about his politics - including his falling for Iseult Gonne, the daughter of Maud, in 1916 and cavorting, in the last few years of his life in England and France, with a number of younger women.

In Ireland now, we have won the intellectual freedom of which Yeats and Lady Gregory dreamt. Their struggles against censorship and all forms of Irish stupidity are chronicled in great detail by Foster. Yeats's search for freedom and a soaring autonomy, within the self and the soul, as much as in the body politic, makes him our contemporary. The poems, however, rise above that. They belong to the great future. He was lucky in his friends, and wise in keeping them; so, too, he has been lucky and wise, if that is the word, with his biographer.

Colm ToibIn is the author of Lady Gregory's Toothbrush (Picador)

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