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 themati...