"Fragmentary Symbolists": Keatsian gusts in Yeats's "The Wind among the Reeds"

While there seems to be almost perfect accord on Blake and Shelley as Yeats’s “prime poetic predecessors” and on their influence especially on his early work and thought, Keats’s role, though often hinted at, has not attracted due attention yet, or, when dealt with, has tended to produce controversial results. This paper intends to show that, though widely scattered over all Romantic literature, musical and phonic references represent a distinguishing feature of the relationship between Keats and Yeats, especially in the latter’s poetry collection The Wind Among the Reeds (1899): in fact, in both authors, instead of being rooted in the typical Romantic bipartition of reality, they seem to derive from its innovative tripartition into three distinct but interacting domains with different phonic components and cultural implications.