ABSTRACT
This chapter takes the example of W. B. Yeats as a source, an allusion, or even an echo within contemporary American poetry and music, in particular, to think carefully about the ways in which American artists use Irish poetic influences up to the present day. It focuses transatlantic transposition of Yeats's lyrical musings into music is nothing new. Yeats's poem about loss in the skies in World War I is transposed to a typical immigrant scene in which Irish Americans become mere suggestions of their antecedents. Byzantium here is fictionalized and idealized as a place lost in time but also sacralized by it. The various echoes heard here within American cultural reverberations of W. B. Yeats—both as man and poet, and at both "low" and "high" levels—constitute an ongoing process of figuration and re-configuration that is at the heart of composition.
