The Tower

The Tower is the collection where Yeats became fully himself, the aging man in his tower, raging and wondering, writing poems that burn with intellectual and emotional intensity.

Why Start Here

Published when Yeats was in his sixties, The Tower contains some of the greatest poems in the English language: “Sailing to Byzantium,” “Leda and the Swan,” “Among School Children,” “The Tower” itself. These are poems about time, beauty, old age, and the persistence of the creative spirit, and they carry an urgency that his earlier, more decorative work rarely reaches.

If you try the early Yeats first and find it too soft, come here and you will find a completely different poet. If you love the early work, The Tower will expand what you thought he could do. Either way, this is the collection that secures his place among the immortals.

What to Expect

Dense, allusive poems that reward slow reading. References to Irish mythology, occult symbolism, and Yeats’s own idiosyncratic philosophical system (no need to master it, the emotional force comes through anyway). Some of the most memorable lines in English poetry, sitting inside poems that are more complex and strange than the excerpts suggest.