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It is generally accepted in Yeats criticism that Crazy Jane series poems in his Words for Music Perhaps are the poet’s Mad Songs originated from his obsession with sexual passion in his old age. And a number of critics have found Crazy Jane poems to be a work of heroic tragedy. But there is no tragedy for Crazy Jane, nor can she be tragic in herself. Even if she is a crazy old witch, cursing a moralizing Bishop, she can be seen as a poetic persona for Yeats to criticize his contemporary Ireland culture.
As an ex-Senator of “sixty-year-old smiling public man” Yeats would not be at ease in criticizing on his country’s agonizing preoccupations with its “Irishness.” However, Yeats had a long career of attacking his contemporary Ireland. So for Yeats in Ireland’s 1920s and 30s self definition processes, it would be natural to publish his opposing views on the several censorship laws and general trends towards cultural exclusions in which the Catholic social teachings dominated the major discussions on sexual and gender questions, excluding the other secular arguments.
Yeats had always been fascinated by the unity of the opposites. His Crazy Jane represents Yeats’s concept on unity-in metaphysical meaning and in cultural level as well- through her arguments on love and body. Crazy Jane suggests that the energy of bodily desire is essential element in life and it may be originated from the interplay of the dirty and the pure, the sacred and the secular, and then it can urge human being make the greatest effort to affirm the physical fullness of reality. His contemporary Ireland Catholicism, in his view, excludes the body and soul. So in individual and in nation as well, “nothing can be sole or whole that has not been rent” for Yeats.