.... A Black Woman, Sir Hugh Lane Bequest, 1917; on loan to the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin, since 1979. Image © The National Gallery, London. This chapter examines the philosophical origins and political urgencies of William Butler Yeats's demand for “perfection...

... of social life and for securing the most fundamental object of moral regard. The book considers Language poetry as well as the work of William Butler Yeats, George Oppen, and Frank O'Hara—poets who seek ways to make their poetic thinking yield accounts of personhood that are at once minimal and universal...