W. B. Yeats

The Later Poetry
W. B. Yeats: The Later Poetry by Thomas Parkinson offers a sustained analysis of Yeats’s late work, focusing on how his poems were composed, revised, and shaped into their final form. Building on his earlier study Yeats, Self-Critic, Parkinson turns to the manuscripts, prose writings, and finished poems to establish Yeats’s poetics, examining not just what Yeats believed about poetry in principle but how those beliefs were tested and refined in the act of composition.

The book moves thematically through Yeats’s lyric dramaturgy, symbolism, and prosody. Parkinson argues that Yeats’s later work is best understood as the product of a dramatic imagination: even his most intimate lyrics are shaped by a sense of the poet as spokesman within a larger dramatic design of the universe. Close readings of recurring icons—such as the swan, sun, and moon—show how their meanings shift with the dramatic motives of each poem. Detailed study of Yeats’s prosodic idiom, largely built on stress and syllabic lines, reveals how syntax, rhythm, and image interact to produce tonal complexity. Throughout, Parkinson emphasizes Yeats’s refusal to accept simple or mechanical solutions to poetic problems, instead allowing poems to grow, alter, and complicate themselves as opportunities arose in form or theme.

The result is a portrait of Yeats’s late poetics as rational yet deeply embodied in practice: an inclusive system that critiques and extends modernist theories of impersonality and symbol while renovating traditional forms in light of Yeats’s personal and historical experience. W. B. Yeats: The Later Poetry positions Yeats as both inheritor and critic of modernism, showing how his recklessness of judgment and dramatic sense liberated his verse into new depths and textures, with enduring relevance for contemporary poetics.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1964.

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