Yeats as Precursor: Reading in Irish, British and American Poetry

As both a late Romantic and a modern, W.B. Yeats has proved to be perhaps the most influential poet of the early twentieth-century. In this original study, Steven Matthews traces, through close readings of significant poems, the flow of Yeatsian influence across time and cultural space. By engaging with formalist criticism, he also considers Yeats's significance as founding presence within the major poetry criticism of the century.