ABSTRACT
WITH The Tower and The Winding Stair Yeats' writing comes fully into its strength and words respond completely to the poem's call to order. To say that Yeats was incapable of writing a bad poem during this phase is an exaggeration, but one within the limits of critical licence. His best poems have the quality of greatness; they reward and yet defeat analysis, remaining obstinately superior to the sum of everything that can be said about them. Nevertheless, though the content of greatness remains permanently elusive, the style of greatness invites critical definition; the suggestion made here is that Yeats' poetry achieves the self-conquest which he himself called style by a sensitive engaging of extremities, in which commitment to either extremity is avoided and the poem grows out of the creative tension between them. His poetry succeeds, in other words, because it is securely the poetry of the mainstream.
