Whatever ‘remorse’ Yeats may have felt for his ‘intemperate speech’ in 1931 when he wrote those lines, he certainly recognised an excellent subject for poetry. All around Yeats, people were speaking, in their real lives, lines as colourful and passionate as any recited on the Abbey stage. Years earlier he had written to explain the poems of Responsibilities, ‘Three public controversies have stirred my imagination’, the debates over Charles Stewart Parnell, Playboy of the Western World and the Hugh Lane Gallery.