Politics by W.B. Yeats   As someone who never took an English class post-high school, I had to teach myself literature, which I did, like most autodidacts, by reading as widely as possible – and indiscriminately.  If there was any method in my madness (which involved getting a shit job in a library so I could read through the stacks from one side of the building to the other), it was to read the collected poems of anybody, famous or not, who had one.  Toward the end of this weird and rather lengthy curriculum, which is to say, the end of the alphabet, I arrived at the work of William Butler Yeats.  What a relief it was!  Rhymey, romantic, folkloric, woman-crazy stuff with a…