The Artist’s Tragic Flight: Yeats’s Portrayal of Major Robert Gregory

In this essay, the author reviews the four elegies W. B. Yeats wrote in honor of Robert Gregory (son of Lady Gregory and an artist who perished in WWI), as well as the poet’s prose tribute to the younger man in order argue that, as depicted in “An Irish Airman foresees His Death,” Gregory emblematizes what Frank Lentricchia has termed the “Yeatsian poetic of will.” Noting Yeats’s late-career conceptualization, indeed celebration, of life as tragic, the author argues that (1) Gregory’s landscape paintings also depict a tragic vision of existence and therefore that (2) as a consequence Yeats’s attitude toward Gregory’s artistic talent may be less ambivalent than many literary critics have implied in their interpretations of the elegies. Considering Gregory’s status as the inspiration behind two of Yeats’s most famous poems, it is odd that virtually nothing has been written about his artwork.