ABSTRACT
The turn of the century was in many ways a turning point for Yeats, and it is a
convenient landmark in tracing his wayward relationship with Shelley. Yeats had spent the
first fifteen years of his poetic career dealing in part with the attitudes towards poetry and
the poet that Shelley had developed in his early poems. Yeats viewed his Shelleyan
inheritance as a mixed blessing, for while he found a theme for his poems in Shelley's
for Shelley, a dead end.
