W. B. Yeats

W. B. Yeats: Realms of the Romantic Imagination shows us how Yeats’s unorthodox approaches to poetic meaning, especially within modernist poetry, are part of the how the poet “astonishes” his contemporary readers. By astonishment, I refer to the Aesthetics of the Canon in which Frank Kermode explains how each generation of reader must always discover anew the wonder of transcendent meaning in poetry. What John Nkemngong Nkengasong does here is demonstrate how Yeats ultimately adhered to forms of creativity more aligned with Romanticism, undergirded with the sense of transcendence that is part of poetry itself and not necessarily part of the wider forms of belief which modernism engages and perhaps battles.