W. B. Yeats's ‘Among School Children’: The Poem and its Critics

W. H. Auden's ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’ famously says that on his death ‘the poet became his admirers’. ‘Among School Children’ is one of Yeats's greatest poems, and it is also one of his most written-about. So it is possible with this poem to consider in some depth the way Yeats has become his admirers, to test the air he breathes in his afterlife. I want to follow the poem from its inception to one of its most recent critiques. This may tell us something useful about Yeats, and it may also tell us something interesting about the nature of literary criticism. In 1922 Yeats became a senator of the newly created Irish Free State, and in 1923 he won the Nobel Prize. He had become therefore what he calls himself in the poem's opening stanza, ‘a sixty-year-old smiling public man’. Yeats took his duties as a senator seriously; and they included sitting on a committee investigating Irish schools, most of which came under the direct control of the Irish Catholic Church. Yeats found them seriously lacking, materially, intellectually and spiritually; and his speeches and writings on the topic seemed almost to court the ferocious response they met from Irish Catholic opinion. One of the schools he visited, in 1926, however, St Otteran's in Waterford, which was run by the Sisters of Mercy, operated according to the recently formulated Montessori system, and Yeats admired it. In March 1926 he made a note headed ‘Topic for poem’: ‘School children, and the thought that life will waste them, perhaps that no possible life can fulfill their own dreams or even their teacher's hope. Bring in the old thought that life prepares for what never happens’. That is ‘the old thought’ for Yeats because he had already expressed it in both Reveries over Childhood and Youth in 1914 and in At the Hawk's Well in 1917.