My obsession with Yeats leads me to be thoroughly entertained by the following quote, which is probably to be expected. I’ll keep you posted with more prose on Yeats as I read further.  

“In Irish Theosophist, a magazine whose very title is enough to raise the ghosts of the ninties, carried an interview with Mr. W.B. Yeats in its issue for 15 October 1893. It had been conducted by the editor, one D.N. Dunlop, who set the scene in his opening paragraphs: 

“‘A few evenings ago I called on my friend, Mr. W.B. Yeats, and found him alone, seated in his armchair, smoking his cigarette, with a volume of Homer before him. The whole room indicated the style and taste peculiar to its presiding genius. Upon the walls hung various designs by Blake and other less well-known symbolic artists; everywhere books and papers in apparently endless confusion.

“‘In his usual genial way he invited me to have a cup of tea with him. During this pleasant ceremony little was said, but sufficient to impress me more than ever with the fact that my host was supremely an artist, much in love with his art.’

“Yeats was then twenty-eight, and could deploy that elaborate style he had learned from Pater with as much indolent calculation on a sofa as in a sentence. If he had not yet formulated his theory of the mask, he had an instinctive grasp on the potency of his image; and if he does not altogether ruffle here in a manly pose, there is neverless a bit of peacock display going on. The Homer volume was a nice touch, and so was the cigarette and the ‘ceremony’ of the tea. 

“The young man whose concern for appearances had led him, a few years earlier, to ink his heels in order to disguise the holes in his socks has obviously mastered more complex and sure-footed strategies for holding the line between himself and the world. He had not, to be sure, acquired the peremptory authority which Frank O’Connor was to see in action decades later, when the poet could silence an argument or butress a proposition with a remark such as ‘Ah, but that was before the peacock screamed ….’”

– “Yeats as an Example?” in Preoccupations by Seamus Heaney.