The Symbol of “the Winding Stair” and the Style of the Later Yeats

Abstract

This paper studies an intentional structure of interpretation through his symbol of “the winding stair” that reflects a form of imagination that would be read, quite literally, in Yeats’s own terms. T. S. Eliot has argued that Yeats as we know him today would be as defined by his later maturity as he had been by the promise of his early work. Perceiving Yeats’s art in this manner shows a poet at full capacity, one whose legacy might have been otherwise limited by a successful early lyrical career. It was what he did to emphasize the development of the poetic process that would allude to a romantic inspiration that allowed the later prose and poetry to gain an importance that even surpassed the promise of his early lyrical work in terms of the development of poetic themes central to his work.