ABSTRACT
Metaphors are needed for criticism as much as for poetry, and for a good poet no single metaphor will do. This book has spoken of Yeats' development, of his growth as a poet, or alternatively of his discovery of himself, of the stripping away of those distractions that hid from him the reality of his own voice. The end is implicit in the beginning either as seed or as core and, to quote Yeats, 'our intellects at twenty contain all the truths we shall ever find'. These are metaphors of process and their disadvantage is that they suggest that what comes later is superior to what is earlier because it is more fully developed or more purely quintessential. They should be complemented by a metaphor of pattern in which different positions
are seen, not as superior or inferior to one another, but as stating a collective recognition none of them could state singly. Having said this, it should be added that Yeats was enough of a poet to forget whatever patterns his poetry had created whenever he needed to do so in order to write a poem.
