Yeats's companion volume to The Tower — containing 'Byzantium,' the Crazy Jane poems, and 'A Dialogue of Self and Soul' — exploring the tension between spiritual transcendence and bodily life.
'Byzantium': a more abstract and difficult companion to 'Sailing to Byzantium' — the city of pure art as an image of spiritual achievement and its cost. The Crazy Jane poems: an aged woman's celebration of bodily life and sexual experience against the Bishop's piety — 'Love has pitched his mansion in / The place of excrement.' 'A Dialogue of Self and Soul': the soul's desire for transcendence against the Self's embrace of rebirth into the cycles of life.
Discussing
Ask anything about The Winding Stair — their ideas, influences, contradictions, legacy.
Sign in to start a conversation.