Yeats and Modernism

Abstract

When Yeats died in January 1939, he quickly became the ghost that haunted Modernism. First to register the shade's presence was W. H. Auden, who wrote his famous elegy “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” in February 1939: Now he is scattered among a hundred cities, And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections . . . The words of a dead man Are modified in the guts of the living. . . . For Auden, Yeats is a distasteful Orpheus, whose corpse dismembers into the scattered leaves of his volumes of poetry, undergoing a queasy process of digestion in the guts of his readers.