Yeats from The Tower to the Last Poems

Abstract

Assessing The Tower (1928), Terence Brown says that ‘power celebrated and exercised in this self-consciously masterful book is in no way immune to an ironic vision’ (1999: 316). We shall see an ‘ennobling interchange’ (1850, xiii. 375) between irony and conviction from The Tower to Yeats’s posthumously published Last Poems (1939). His last collections make their way out of this modern dialectic, this conflict of scepticism and belief, which spans from the dramatic or comic irony of Theseus’ disbelief in ‘anticke’ (F) or ‘antique’ (Q 1600) ‘fables’ in A Midsummer-Night’s Dream (V. i. 3) to Stevens’s decision to say ‘We say’, at once affirming and qualifying a belief that ‘God and the imagination are one’ (SCP: 524).