ABSTRACT
There is a lightness of touch about Yeats's interactions with the Romantic poetic past; a fluid sensitivity to his predecessors allows Yeats to chart a course avoiding the twin extremes of mastery and surrender. Yeats's relationship to Romanticism is a complex, shifting, and an ultimately individual response to a tradition that he never repudiates, nor wholly assimilates. Yeats's interactions with Romanticism have a deft confidence shown by his treatment of his preoccupations. There is a Wordsworthian tone to Yeats's use of memory in The Lake Isle of Innisfree as Yeats imaginatively evokes his memory before the reader. Yeats fuses his Romantic and Transcendental sources into an individual poetic vision. The final collection of Yeats's poetry reflects his decisive self-appointment to a pantheon of his own design, where Romantic poetry sounds as an echo-chamber that, along with his own poetry, forms the basis for his creative drive.
