Joseph Adams, Yeats and the Masks of Syntax (London: Macmillan, 1984) pp. viii+ 111.

Abstract

Adams’s book has an extremely promising title and subject for any reader interested in Yeats’s poetic language and its relations with modern(ist) literature generally. According to the dust jacket and the Introduction the author’s aim is to analyse what he calls the “syntactic masks” which supposedly are an important feature of Yeats’s poetry, in the light of current literary and linguistic theory. On balance, the book does not fulfil its promise.