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choice, the poet of the Irish tradition", as said by A. G. Stock, in "W. B. Yeats: His Poetry and Thought" in 1961. So, when reading his poems it may help to remember that Ireland and Irish conventions and meanings are different from those in England and in the words of Stock, "it is easy in reading English literature to slip into the assumption that no other values are possible. Much of what Yeats wrote will then look like mere embroideries, or a deliberate shirking of the modern world, when in fact he was true to his own experience and deeply in earnest". Keeping Yeats in his context and gaining a knowledge of Irish folklore and traditions is therefore important for reading Yeats.

The second difficulty a reader would come across with the poems of Yeats is the fact they are often obscure, especially in his later years, which often included overtones of various occult and spiritual connotations. The later collections like The Tower require the reader to know and understand a lot about Keats's life during the period, as well as his beliefs. These poems are definitely not self-explanatory, the writings of the later period are a combination of history, philosophy, mysticism, and psychology, but a little bit of background study would prove rewarding. The critic F. A. C. Wilson says in "W. B. Yeats and Tradition" in 1958:

"It may be desirable in poetry that the words on the page should make their full meaning felt without recourse to any ulterior body of knowledge, and the current tendency in criticism is to apply these presuppositions to Yeats: but Yeats was not a new critic, and he knew nothing of its disciplines........it may become classical in Yeats criticism that his poetry does require for its full resolution an ulterior body of knowledge"

But Yeats had the affirmations of another stalwart of twentieth century poet, T.S. Eliot, who paid a tribute to Yeats in the following words, which strikingly sums up Yeats's contribution to English poetry:

"There are some poets whose poems can be considered more or less in isolation, for experience and delight. There are others whose poetry, though giving equally experience and delight, has a larger historical importance. Yeats was one of the latter. He was one of the few whose history was the history of our own time, who are part of the consciousness of our age, which cannot be understood without them".

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