Yeats' interest in Irish history and myth led him to form a distinctly Irish identity for himself. Given the post-Famine political climate into which he was born, the blossoming of Yeats' sense of Irish tradition into a streak of nationalism appears a natural occurrence.

Yeats was an unwavering pacifist, and though his pro-Irish convictions were solid throughout his life, his relationship to the outward expression of those convictions via nationalism was more fraught. He resisted pushes to turn his poetry and drama into mere propaganda for the nationalist movement. Even while commemorating the Easter Uprising in the poem "Easter 1916," he makes clear the ambiguity of his views on the rebellion, writing of the rebels that "Too long a sacrifice / Can make a stone of the heart," and of England, "Was it needless death after all? / For England may keep faith / For all that is done and said. / We know their dream: enough / To know they dreamed and are dead" (Yeats, Collected Poems 181-182). Earlier in the same poem he admits a degree of forgiveness for John MacBride, the abusive husband of of Yeats' beloved Maud Gonne, who was among the rebels executed for the uprising.

The way Yeats enacted his nationalist impulses was characteristically less flamboyant than that of Gonne. Even so, it would be naïve to ignore the potent role she played in Yeats' nationalist engagement.

Though Gonne wrote in her autobiography, the ironically titled A Servant of the Queen, that she considered herself a pacifist, her actions did not bear that philosophy out so well as Yeats' did. "It is the English who have forced war upon us," she wrote (115) to explain the dissonance between her words and rebellious acts. In W.B. Yeats: A Life, R.F. Foster quotes an account Yeats gives, in a letter to William Sharp, of keeping Gonne out of a riot which erupted following a lecture of hers: "'I was able by main force to keep Miss Gonne out of a riot in which one was killed,'"Yeats wrote. "'Miss Gonne had organized the procession & felt responsible & thought that she should be among the people when the police attacked them. She was very indignant at my interference'" (181). Yeats and Gonne's differences over nationalism would prove to be a point of contention between them, with Gonne casting aspersions on what she saw as W.B.'s lack of commitment to the cause of Ireland. Tellingly, when Yeats was appointed a Free State senator, Gonne said she "renounced [his] society forever," as Yeats told it in a letter to Olivia Shakespear (The Letters of W.B. Yeats 697). In this letter Yeats does not seem bitter over Maud's hyperbolic reaction to his senatorship, but instead merely resigned to the sturm und drang of her moods. He knew her anger would subside with time. The historical arc of Yeats' nationalism led from subversion and rebellion to eventual legitimation as a member of a new Irish establishment. Gonne never made such a shift, and nothing appears to suggest she would have wanted to given the opportunity.