I
n a letter addressed to Lady Gregory on December 26, 1902, William Butler
Yeats first acknowledged the onset of what would become a lifelong fascination
with Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy: “Dear Friend,” he confesses:
I have written to you little and badly of late I am afraid for the truth is you
have a rival in Nietzsche, the strong enchanter. I have read him so much that
I have made my eyes bad again. They were getting well it seemed. Nietzsche
completes Blake & has the same roots—I have not read anything with so much
excitement, since I got to love Morris’s stories which have the same curious
astringent joy (CL3 284)
Less than three months later, Yeats expressed comparable sentiments to the
New York lawyer, John Quinn, who had recently gifted him all of the available
English translations of Nietzsche’s books:
I do not know how I can thank you too much for the three volumes on
Nietzsche. I had never read him before, but find that I had come to the same
conclusions on several cardinal matters. He is exaggerated and violent but has
helped me very greatly to build up in my mind an imagination of the heroic
life. His books have come to me at exactly the right moment, for I have planned
out a series of plays which are all intended to be an expression of that life which
seem[s] to me the kind of proud hard gift giving joyousness (CL3 313
