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The author gives an account of how the poet, William Butler Yeats, at the age of 68 underwent the Steinach operation, a modern day vasectomy, in an attempt to rejuvenate himself physiologically and psychologically. For some years prior to this the poet had been suffering from impotence and had been unable to write any new poetry. Throughout his life he had placed considerable emphasis on external sources of magic and power and was engaged in a lifelong quest for a relationship with the feminine as the source of creative energy. After the operation he embarked on a number of ‘affairs’ which he called his ‘second puberty’. Evidence is limited as to whether his sexual impotence improved, but there were several benefits psychologically in that he produced many masterful poems in these last five years of his life. The paper discusses these issues and considers how Yeats's family background and upbringing contributed to his emotional development and his life as a poet.
Yeats was born in Dublin in 1865, the eldest child of an absent but dominant father and an emotionally undemonstrative and depressed mother. His father, although interested and concerned for his son, lived primarily in London, whilst the poet and his mother and siblings lived in Sligo in the West of Ireland. Tension and quarrelling between father and son were the outcome of this relationship, though Yeats also spoke admiringly of his father. When Yeats was 9, clearly against his mother's wishes, his father moved the family to London. Yeats's mother comes across as a relatively absent figure who struggled to fulfil her maternal role. She herself was one of 12 children and so one can speculate on her own emotional deprivation. She did, however, have a love of the Sligo countryside and its folk traditions. Yeats found solace from his painful childhood in the countryside and in Irish folklore, which may have been a way of maintaining a link to his mother. However, the lack of a satisfactory relationship with her