Abstract
Immediately after World War I, four major European and American poets and thinkers - W.B. Yeats, Robinson Jeffers, R.M. Rilke, and C.G. Jung - moved into towers as their principal habitations. Taking this coincidence as its starting point, this text sets out to locate modern turriphilia in its cultural context and to explore the biographical circumstances that motivated the four writers to choose their unusual retreats. From the ziggurats of ancient Mesopotamia to the ivory towers of the fin de siecle, the author traces the emergence of a variety of symbolic associations with the towers of the past, ranging from spirituality and intellect to sexuality and sequestration. But in every case the tower served both literally and symbolically as a refuge from the urban modernism with whose values the four writers found themselves at odds.
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