The Identity of Yeats

I was disappointed in this book. Ellmannn writes in his preface that he intends the book to be a companion to his biography of Yeats (which I really liked), a biography of Yeats's poetry to accompany his biography of Yeats's life. in a way it is such a book, a chronological overview of Yeats's poetry, with some excellent close reading and impressive prosody. The first half gets bogged down in mapping Yeats's symbols. The second half was much more interesting, but the ending once again finds Ellmann in a discursive mire, this time where he tries to explain Yeats's philosophy, which seems maddeningly contradictory, even capricious.