The Use of Talisman in William Butler Yeats’s Poetry: A Signifier of the Objet Petit a

Abstract

Yeats’s poetry is quite rich in the imagery of loss, yearning for the glorious and distant past, and a search for identity. The Tower is almost emblematic of the poet’s disillusionment with the modern and of his nostalgic desire for the long-forgotten past. This article intends to analyse the social, political and psychological reasons underlying the sense of loss pervading through the particular book and in order to keep reliability of the order of poems or their presence in the book, The Variorum Edition of Alspach and Allt, including the final texts, will be used, otherwise it would be rather difficult to follow the poems as Yeats is notorious for his revising his poems and even the order of the poems in his books.