The poetry of W. B. Yeats is both the culmination of the nineteenth century and the unsurpassed achievement of the twentieth; he is at once a bridge from the minor achievements of the preceding decades to the major works of Irish poetry and their greatest instance. Through him Irish poetry learned to confront modernity and found new ways to configure the relations between literary works and nationalist ideology. Yeats marshalled the major elements of nineteenth-century culture – translation from the Irish, antiquarianism, the influence of English Romanticism and the Arts and Crafts Movement, the tensions for an artist between an English audience and his Irish provenance – and employed them in the creation of some of the best poems in the English language. He drew together figures as diverse as Mangan, Davis and Ferguson and crafted their legacy into an Irish poetic.

Yeats transformed himself from a fin de siècle poet to a poet, who if not a Modernist himself, certainly set the pace for Modernism through his connections with Pound, and to a lesser extent Eliot. Along with Robert Frost, Paul Valéry, Rainer Maria Rilke, he demonstrated that twentieth-century poetry, in order to be truly of its time, need not rid itself of traditional poetic devices. Nevertheless, while spurning most Modernist innovations he paid close attention to them, and some critics argue that Pound and especially James Joyce affected the development of Yeats's later poetry and critical thought.