Poems of W.B. Yeats: The Tower William Butler Yeats

William Butler Yeats’ Sailing to Byzantium (1926) is one of the more remarkable poems from The Tower, a celebrated collection of poems published in 1929. The poem is remarkable partly because of its highly suggestive and ambiguous language, which...

In many of William Butler Yeats’s works, he creates a seemingly inescapable gyre or cycle that history and human lives follow. In The Second Coming, Yeats examines the cycle of history in which every two thousand years, a new messiah arrives. In...

Artists often use their work as an expression of their innermost thoughts and feelings. In his poem, “Sailing to Byzantium,” W.B. Yeats describes a metaphorical journey to Byzantium, an ancient city filled with timeless art, that the poem’s...

William Butler Yeats, the esteemed twentieth-century poet, was in love with the Irish nationalist Maud Gonne; his poem “The Two Trees” was originally written for her. Gonne was very devoted to rather uncompromising ideologies, but in this poem...

In 1919, the year “The Second Coming” was written, World War I, one of the deadliest wars in history, had just ended and Ireland was in the throes of a war to fight British control. Tensions between Catholics and Protestants and those of different...

More so than any other Modernist writer, William Butler Yeats’ life and work reveal themselves to be intricately connected and draw on each other in multifarious ways. What makes Yeats’ poetry achieve so much power is the conscious employment of...

The idea that poetic forms are sensitive to and affected by the pressures of history is undisputed; yet whether a poet embraces this or challenges it varies. The adoption of a specific form inevitably implies historical concern. This is evident...

Whilst this is a credible assessment of Yeats’s later works and can be supported through analysis of the poems ‘Crazy Jane talks with a Bishop’ and ‘The Tower’, it is a limited and superficial view which fails to grasp the metaphorical meaning of...