W.B. Yeats was out of the country on the warm Easter Monday in 1916 when armed rebels took over Dublin’s General Post Office and proclaimed Ireland’s freedom. By the end of the week their fledgling republic was snuffed out, and the summary trials and executions began. Yeats was shocked but also powerfully, if rather reluctantly, moved. Though pivotal to Ireland’s national cultural revival, a political revolutionary he was not. Nor was he much enamoured of (or himself appreciated by) the younger Irish nationalists from whom the real revolutionaries came. Yet now he acknowledged that as a result of their actions “a terrible beauty is born”. His poem begins, “I have met them at close of day/ Coming with vivid faces.” R.F. Foster, who has previously w