Blake, Yeats, Larkin : nihilism and the indifferent consolation of Post-Romanticism

Abstract

It was during the Irish Civil War, sometime between 1922 and 1923, that W.B. Yeats, ensconced in Thoor Ballylee, the Norman tower that served both as a romantic, Samuel Palmer-esque symbol of the poet-scholar’s separate, elevated fixedness above the mundane, hurly burly world of his fellow man, as well as an actual stone and mortar defence against intrusions from the outside world, composed a sardonically barbed renunciation in verse of both poetic transcendence and the possibility of any sort of tide-stemming defence against what he saw as a general devaluation of values.