The Mature Poet

The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair (1933) represent the mature Yeats at his very best- a realist-symbolist-Metaphysical poet with an uncanny power over words. These volumes represent his fourth and greatest period. Here, in his poems of the 1920s and 1930s, winding stairs, spinning tops, "gyres," spirals of all kinds, are important symbols; not only are they connected to Yeats's philosophy of history and of personality but they also serve as a means of resolving some of those contraries that had arrested him from the beginning. Life is a journey up a spiral staircase; as we grow older we cover the ground we have covered before, only higher up; as we look down the winding stair below us we measure our progress by the number of places where we were but no longer are. The journey is both repetitious and progressive; we go both round and upward. Through symbolic images of this kind Yeats explores the paradoxes of time and change, of growth and identity, of love and age, of life and art, of madness and wisdom.

The Byzantium poems show him trying to escape from the turbulence of life to the calm eternity of art. But in his fifth and final period he returned to the turbulence,and his last poems have a controlled yet startling wildness. Yeats's return to life, to "the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart," is one of the most impressive final phases of any poet's career.

Click below to listen to Yeats read "The Lake Isle of Innisfree."

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Nietzche, fascism, revolution, and death, among other things: Seamus Deane, "Yeats and the Idea of Revolution."

Click to read and examine W. H. Auden's poem, "In Memory of W. B. Yeats."