Among School Children

This poem was written three years after Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, which recognized his ability to shift between forms and his mastery of the art. Although most renowned for his poems about myth, magic, and the natural world, the later years of his life in politics influenced his work as well. Many of his poems written around this time were more modern in nature, focusing on politics and the events happening in the world around him. These political years marked a distinctive period in Yeats’s canon.

While the form of “Among School Children” still follows a traditional approach in regard to rhyme and meter, it has a fluidity that may have come from his friendship with modernist poets of the time, such as Ezra Pound, who was an earlier champion of free verse poetry. Although much of this poem is directed inward at the poet’s own imaginings and philosophy, there are sections where the reader can discern a more concrete conversational quality that would go on to distinguish modern free verse. This is most clear in the first stanza, which is the most realistic and accessible of the entire poem, and also in the end of the fourth stanza: “enough of that, / Better to smile on all that smile, and show / There is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow” (Lines 30-32).