I think this idea is really helpful for understanding early Yeats’ obsession with “Celtic racial pride,” if it can be called that, and the implications he saw in it for the global community. His early poems are deeply infused with exactly that kind of “beauty of the old anew” vibe, painting the ancient Irish landscape and geography and mythology in poetry collections that are being produced for and published by a 20th century readership. Presenting the unknowably old as something contemporary has its own kind of amiable illogic, whereby culturally closed images and names are used to evoke the soul of any reader anywhere. The strategy presumes that common, fundamental rituals and ways of life, to which all human beings are tied and recognize, are evoked by distinctly Celtic poetry, to the degree that others from outside of Ireland, with no connection to the names and songs mentioned in the poems, will “get it.” When set against concrete, conversational poems like “No Second Troy,” or “Upon a House,” or “The Witch,” these older poems are so dreamy and abstract I can’t help but feel Yeats’ liking for directionless evocation, poetry for poetry’s sake, beauty for beauty’s sake. It seems like a simpler, happier time in his life and career.