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Southern men have a spot on their bookshelves for the works of William Butler Yeats, the poet and Irish rebel.

We southrons are a bardic lot and our ancestors hunted, fought, distilled malt liquor and celebrated their heroic deeds with ballads and dancing. High-brow literature such as critical essays and poetry doesn't come to us naturally. Southern men prefer horse racing to Hamlet and duck blinds to Diderot, but even the most rustic of us appreciates the pounding rhythm and haunting themes of William Butler Yeats's Irish poems.

To date not a single Charlestonian has been identified as having met or corresponded with the Irish poet and nationalist, William Butler Yeats.

Well, Josephine Pinckney did entertain Padraic Colum, another Irish poet and playwright at her family's home on 21 King Street in 1922. Colum regaled Pinckney, along with Hervey Allen and Dubose Heyward, with tales of how Yeats and others of the Celtic Movement had founded the Abbey Theater in Dublin.

There were quite a few Charlestonians of the Hibernian connection, however, who boasted of friendship with Irish nationalist Eamon de Valera when he came here in 1920.

Charles Stuart Parnell, another Irish apostle of secession, who visited here before de Valera, also had backers here.

William Butler Yeats may not have been the charismatic commander as was the big fellow, Michael Collins, and he may not have had the raw-boned courage of his convictions as did the Irish martyr, Patrick "Padraig" Pearse. Yet, in spite of his protestant roots and abhorrence of violence, W.B. Yeats remains for many the pure essence of Irish nationalism.

The lack of personal identification with the Old South doesn't limit the appeal of Yeats and his poetry among Southern gentlemen, however. From Oxford, Miss., to Charlottesville, Va., to the Horseshoe in Columbia, well-read Southern men reserve a prominent spot on the bookshelf for "The Collected Poems of William Butler Yeats." There's something about Yeats that just fits in with the volumes of Douglas Southall Freeman, Dumas Malone, and Robert Penn Warren.

There's something, too, about Yeats's poems that resonates with that unvanquished mood in the Old South. Scholars have pored over recurring themes in this iconic Irishman's works looking for those haunting refrains of dashed hope and disillusionment - themes akin to Faulkner's tales of Yoknapatawpha in the aftermath of the Confederacy - or Thomas Wolfe's "Oh, Lost" illusions in "Look Homeward Angel."

Yeats was an ardent Irish nationalist even when the odds of independence from Britain were long. Yeats was a womanizer even when the charge for churchmen was adultery. He was obsessed with spiritualism and the occult when damnation of the soul was the risk.

His near fatal attraction to the beautiful Maude Gonne - and even to her alluring young daughter - bespeaks the unrequited passion for illicit amours that so many southern men seem prey to.

Any man who could pen the lines of "The Second Coming or "Slouching Towards Bethlehem,"" containing the immortal refrain "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned; / The best all lack conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity," is a kindred soul with all true sons of the American South.

The idea of independence in our south land was not the long-burning ember known by clandestine Sinn-Fein and the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Old Eire's sufferings at the hands of England began centuries ago with its conquest by William of Orange.

Even so, many southerners found themselves sympathetic with the cause of Old Eire. Ireland's angst embraced the conqueror's disdain for its language, its religion - the entire Celtic culture was anathema. Ireland's conquerors even found its wearing of green to be offensive as if it expressed some symbolic rebellion to British authority.

Yeats longed for Irish independence, but he thought that the 1916 Easter Rising was foolhardy and poorly planned. The seven-day uprising resulted in much destruction to Dublin's center-city as the British navy was able to get a gunboat in close. Many here in the South thought that the attack on Fort Sumter was foolhardy.

Brash acts motivated by lofty, often unattainable ideals go right along with both the American South and the Irish cultures.

One of the Irish rebels who was executed by Britain for his part in the rebellion was John MacBride, William Butler Yeats's rival for the affections of the beautiful, willowy Maude Gonne. MacBride seduced Gonne - or it may have been the other way around - and a son, Sean, was the product of their unhappy union.

Yet, in the spirit of chivalry, Yeats composed a stanza to commemorate his tragic rival's heroic demise: "This other man I had dreamed / A drunken, vainglorious lout. / He had done most bitter wrong / To some who are near to my heart, / Yet I number him in the song; / He, too, has resigned his part / In the casual comedy; / He, too, has been changed in his turn, / Transformed utterly: / A terrible beauty is born." Maude Gonne, the object of Yeats's adoration, belittled him for casting MacBride, a hero of both the Boer War and the latest failed Irish Rising, as lager lout.

Just as the Virginia ex-Confederate, John Esten Cooke, gave us "Wearing of the Gray," a collection of southern tales of the southern lost cause, Yeats created the phrase "wearing of the green" in his Easter Rising - "I write it out in a verse: MacDonagh and MacBride And Connolly and Pearse / Now and in time to be, Wherever green is worn, / Are changed, changed utterly: /A terrible beauty is born." We understand the loss of promising young men cut down in their prime - dying for a cause they felt was noble. Yeats brings his reader into the midst of great human tragedy. Through rhyme and cadence we feel the fight is joined, the foe well met. Southerners have Timrod and Lanier, yet, there's room on our shelf for Yeats, as well.

The fact that he was a horse lover and a frequenter of the race track endears the Irishman even more to his admirers in this part of the country. His poem "At Galway Races" closes with the refrain, "Sing on: somewhere at some new moon, / We'll learn that sleeping is not death, / Hearing the whole earth change its tune, / Its flesh being wild, and it again / Crying aloud as the racecourse is, And we find hearteners among men / That ride upon horses."

William Butler Yeats was elected senator in the new Irish Republic, and in those stormy times he packed a pistol in his coat pocket as he watched the proceedings of the drafting of the Irish Constitution in Dublin in 1922.

The masonry outside the Shelbourne Hotel on St. Stephen's Green is pockmocked with bullet holes from the gun battles that raged there in the struggle for independence.

The epithet on Yeats's grave comes from the last lines of his poem, "Under Ben Bulben" - "Cast a cold eye / On life, on death. / Horseman, pass by." If those words don't sound like something that Confederate raider Turner Ashby or Nathan Bedford Forrest might have said, then Ireland doesn't have 40 shades of green and southerners don't like football.

(Dr. Thomas B. Horton is a history teacher at Porter-Gaud School. He lives in the Old Village of Mount Pleasant. See more columns online at www.moultrienews.com. Visit his Web site at www.historyslostmoments.com).