Building W. B. Yeats's Later Poetry

Book excerpt: This book explores Yeats's later poetry through the metaphor of the poetic tower, where different kinds of 'building' - architectural, textual, political and symbolic - were closely interrelated. It chronologically examines Yeats's tower poems, composed during a period of dramatic personal and national transformation, from 1915 to 1932. Within a year after the Easter Rising in Dublin, Yeats acquired a half-ruined Norman tower in County Galway, Ireland, which had enthralled him for the past two decades, and textually and architecturally constructed it into a focus of his life and work. Interweaving the account of the renovation of the actual building and the textual construction in the socio-historical contexts, the book reveals the evolution of Yeats's multiplex tower as an organizing principle of his later poetry. Using the archive of correspondence and manuscript materials of relevant poems, including those which have thus far escaped close attention, the book offers close textual-genetic analyses and a diachronic view of Yeats's tower poetry, which, with its foundations laid decades earlier, he built in the collections from The Wild Swans at Coole (1919) to The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933). Highlighting the delicate exchange between poetry and biography as well as between the textual architecture and the actual one, identifying a turning point in the making of each tower-oriented poem and proposing some draft-dating revisions, this first book-length systematic study on the process of Yeats's creation of the tower casts an unfamiliar light on a familiar yet underexplored landmark in modern poetry and makes his step-by-step construction work come alive. Tomoko Iwatsubo is Professor at Hosei University, Tokyo, Japan. She has published a number of articles on W. B. Yeats.