‘Knights of the air’: Yeats, flight and modernity

This essay explores Yeats’s relationship to the growing ‘air-mindedness’ of Ireland and the increasing prevalence of flight in the aftermath of the First World War. It investigates Gogarty’s improbable claim to have taken Yeats up in a plane in the 1920s, in the context of Ireland’s increasing emphasis on the perceived political, economic and physical benefits of flight. The essay traces Yeats’s Romantic inheritance, notably the Romantic conception of aerial vision and ascent, and his resistance to the ‘machine age’, as it informs his own aesthetics of ascent in the early decades of the 20th century. As one of the earliest authors of a ‘flight’ poem, ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’ (1918), written without experience of flying, Yeats’s influence on the aviation poetry that became more prevalent after World War I is also delineated, alongside the extent to which he captured in his work some of the essence of how the ‘Knights of the Air’ were perceived.