All through his life, of course, and ever since his death, Yeats has been continually rebuked for the waywardness of his beliefs, the remoteness of his behaviour and the eccentricity of his beliefs. Fairies first of all. Then Renaissance court in Tuscany and Big Houses in Galway. Then Phases of the Moon and Great Wheels. What, says the reliable citizen, is the sense of all this? Why do we listen to this gullible aesthete rehearsing the delusions of an illiterate peasantry, this snobbish hanger-on in country houses mystifying feudal facts of the class system, this charlatan patterning history and predicting the future by a mumbo-jumbo of geometry and Ptolomaic astronomy? Our temptation may be to answer the reliable citizen’s terms, let him call the tune and make excuses for Yeats. 

‘Well,’ we might say, ‘when he was a youngster in Sligo he heard these stories about fairies from servants in his grandparent’s house; and then when, as a young poet, he sought a badge of identity for his own culture, something that would mark it off from the rest of the English-speaking world, he found this distinctive and sympathetic thing in the magical world view of the country people. It was a conscious counter-culture act against the rationalism and materialism of late Victorian England.’ To which the citizen replies, ‘Anybody who believes in fairies is mad.’

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