Back

On being asked for a War Poem

Photograph of William Butler Yeats taken by Charles Beresford in 1911

"On being asked for a War Poem" is a poem by William Butler Yeats written on 6 February 1915 in response to a request by Henry James that Yeats compose a political poem about World War I.[1] Yeats changed the poem's title from "To a friend who has asked me to sign his manifesto to the neutral nations" to "A Reason for Keeping Silent" before sending it in a letter to James, which Yeats wrote at Coole Park on 20 August 1915. The poem was prefaced with a note stating: "It is the only thing I have written of the war or will write, so I hope it may not seem unfitting."[2] The poem was first published in Edith Wharton's The Book of the Homeless in 1916 as "A Reason for Keeping Silent".[1] When it was later reprinted in The Wild Swans at Coole, the title was changed to "On being asked for a War Poem".[3]

  1. ^ a b Jeffares,Alexander Norman.A Commentary on the Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats.Stanford University Press (1968) p.189
  2. ^ Yeats, William Butler. qtd. in A Commentary on the Collected Poems of W.B. Yeatsby Norman Alexandere Jeffares. Stanford University Press (1968)p.189
  3. ^ Haughey, Jim. The First World War in Irish Poetry Bucknell University Press (2002) p.162

Developed by StudentB