But I liked Yeats! That wild Irishman. I really loved his love of language, his flow. His chaotic ideas seemed to me just the right thing for a poet. Passion! He was always on the right side. He may be wrongheaded, but his heart was always on the right side. He wrote beautiful poetry.

Achebe’s remarks read as a generous, craft-centered tribute to W. B. Yeats: he praises Yeats’s musical command of English (“love of language, his flow”) and the productive unruliness of his imagination (“chaotic ideas … just the right thing for a poet”). The passage also frames poetic greatness as inseparable from moral temperament—Yeats may be “wrongheaded” in opinions, but Achebe values the poet’s passionate alignment with what he sees as humane or just (“his heart was always on the right side”). The closing sentence reasserts an aesthetic verdict that can stand even amid ideological disagreement: whatever the flaws, the poems endure as “beautiful poetry.”