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

W. B. Yeats has proved to be perhaps the most influential poet of the early twentieth century. His mediatory position, as both late Romantic and modern writer, has bequeathed a complex range of possibility to later poets. The self-proclaimed founder of a distinctive Irish literature, Yeats's contradictory historical position has been tremendously important in challenging later writers to define their own relation to their respective cultural contexts. In this innovative study, Steven Matthews traces, through close readings of significant poems, the flow of Yeatsian influence across time, and also across cultural space - from Ireland to Britain and America. He also explores how Yeats has been a crucial founding presence in the major movements of modern poetry criticism, from formalism to the Yale deconstructionists' negotiations with European theory. By engaging centrally with the work of Harold Bloom, Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida, Matthews offers his own theory of Yeatsian influence across the twentieth century.