This past summer I visited Ireland for the first time. While we were there, they were shooting a film of the life of Michael Collins, the fiery young revolutionary who was ultimately assassinated by Irish dissidents for signing a treaty with the English. In record heat, potential extras donned costumes and headed for the outskirts of Dublin, hoping for a part. One sixteen-year-old girl, bleached hair spiked and colored purple at the tips, an ear full of silver hoops, wondered out loud into the TV cameras why they wouldn't use her. She belonged, she said, because her great-grandfather had been part of the original uprising.

In Ireland, history seemed both terribly long and terribly short. The Dáil, the Republic's parliament, was celebrating seventy-five years of existence. They were debating whether to legalize divorce. If they did, it would be written as part of the country's constitution. "Remember 1690," said the sign in Warrenpoint in the North, and, just as I wondered if there would ever be a solution, I saw another sign reading "All-Party Talks Now." History was Yeatsian. At every turn there was a myth, a story of a hero who had somehow managed to undermine himself, snatching defeat from victory until that, too, was a part of the myth.

When I first read Yeats in my undergraduate years, I felt my way into the poems, often distrusting what I sensed even then to be a faith that I simply did not share. The poems seemed to be built on something, rather than to be building something. At their center was a "given" that I resisted, with the glaring exception of "Easter 1916." What was it that made this poem speak to me, a young American for whom "All is changed, changed utterly" was about as different from "Give me liberty or give me death" as was possible in the larger context of revolution?

What spoke from Yeats' great poem was something that transcended nationality, transcended specific event, transcended even ideology; what spoke was its deep underlying humanity in the form of its understated questions. Could "excess of love" lead to moral blindness? Could there, in reality, be too much of a good thing? "A terrible beauty is born"--in present tense--and this epiphanic line persists wherever and whenever violence is committed in the name of justice.

Thirty-some years later, that refrain pales for me beside a simple statement near the poem's end: "I write it out in a verse-- / MacDonagh and MacBride / And Connolly and Pearse . . . ." The names of the individuals who died--whose lives are, even in the naming, exhumed--test the very premise of their deaths. By all rights, those lines, locked in time as they are, are the part of the poem that should be obsolete. Instead, they bring tears far more quickly than the terrible beauty even youth could understand.

"Easter 1916) is poem #193 in my collected Yeats; "Sixteen Dead Men" is $194. Obviously written at about the same time (and about the same events), ostensibly a debate with critics of the uprising, perfectly cadenced, intricately rhymed, why is this later poem not equally powerful? It, too, addresses the polemical issues, and the middle stanza raises its own (possibly more potent) questions.

You say that we should still the land

Till Germany's overcome;

But who is there to argue that

Now Pearse is deaf and dumb?

And is there logic to outweigh

MacDonagh's bony thumb?

The speaker of this poem pays lip service to the fact that, in the middle of World War I, there might be a greater evil than the English (who had by then agreed to Home Rule), but then quickly undermines that argument with the startling image of the bony thumb. The implication here, in the form of a rhetorical question, is that there is not a logic to outweigh these individual deaths. Trading on the vivid memories of MacDonagh and Pearse (poets who signed the Irish Declaration of Independence), the poem is so thoroughly partisan in its sentiments that it risks losing even readers sympathetic to the Irish cause. "Sixteen Dead Men" is an overtly political poem and, as such, it fails to become universal. "Easter 1916" transcended its own politics through a speaker capable of realizing that "Too long a sacrifice / Can make a stone of the heart."

All poems contain politics. Let me say that again: all poems contain politics. But they must first of all become poems; then they can contain multitudes. Political agenda, as such, is not sufficient to make literature.

What do poets know--and mean--when they say what they say? If--as the O. J. Simpson "trial of the Century" showed us--the word cop carries many connotations, what happens when the poet says Grand Teton, Nike Trail Blazer, rhododendron, regret, reprieve, Soweto? Some words, like Hiroshima, carry with them the power of event. Some, like homeland, carry the longing for something lost or distant. Others date the writer (or the reader)--Burma Shave sign, for instance--simply by whether or not they're recognized. For many readers, words like mother, childhood, Sinn Fein, and Watts carry emotional or political baggage while others--patriotism, honor, duty, daily bread--wallow in disuse or overuse.

Of course the poet knows all this, knows it and works within its confines, shaping from language something at once precise and individual and also inclusive enough to gather in the possibilities. The poet plays on the chasm between the public and private context, explores his own inner spaces, allows for (dare I say, even manipulates?) those spaces in the reader. To the extent that the poet's overriding concerns are personal, the poem can expand with each successive reading. Or shrink to nothing. To the extent that those concerns are public, the poet runs the risk of immediate impact followed by rapid obsolescence, but the poem also has the chance of becoming a shaping force. A terrible beauty may burn for all time.