Reflecting on William Butler Yeats on Easter Sunday

I've been reading through some of the poems of William Butler Yeats, including, coincidentally, Easter 1916, which I read yesterday. Is it still a great poem? Part of the pleasure and interest in reading through some selected Yeats poems comes from watching the evolution of the mind of a poet: from the early somewhat romantic and sentimental work, to an interest in traditional Irish verse and mythology, to the political poems about the Irish uprisings and fights for independence (such as Easter 1916), to the late poems built in part of Yeats's own mythology, and some final poems about age and death, such as Among School Children. Naturally when I was younger I was most drawn to the early poems, including 2 in the Modern Poems (eds Ellman and O'Dair) that I've been reading through: The Like Isle of Inisfree, most of which I can quote from memory thanks to a folk album I had as a teenager - Paths of Victory, By Hamilton Camp - in which he set some poems to his own musical compositions - and When You are Old: strangely, I was really struck by the reference to his loving the "pilgrim soul" of this beautiful woman. I still don't quite know what that means, however, The Irish Uprising poems didn't do much for me when I was younger - and I have to say that now they don't read so well, anyway. Any poem for which we have to look up virtually every name reference is probably not going to last as great verse. Yet: Yet, the poem has memorialized the Uprising - which seems so incredible today, Irish freedom fighters jailed and within a month executed by the British state! - in a way that no history book or account can do, has done. "A terrible beauty is born," still rings like the tolling of a bell. Most of all, it's inspiring to think that there was a day when poems such as this could be published in a daily newspaper, and readers would care about the verse and react to it: It was brave of Yeats to publish such incendiary materials; though many of the topical references in his political poetry are today obscure, we read these poems today to keep alive the idea of poets as the "unacknowledged legislators of the race." Any look at any set of current New Yorker poems will show us, sadly, how far we've moved away from that political ideal.