Introduction: Yeats’s Tower Project

This chapter defines the focus of the book as Yeats’s ‘tower project’, his architectural and textual investment in a particular building at Ballylee, County Galway. The tower project represented a major shift in his poetic style and contributed to forming his later poetry at a crucial stage of his life and work. The chapter offers a chronological overview of the project, including Yeats’s encounter with, acquisition of and periods of residence at Ballylee Castle (which he renamed Thoor Ballylee in 1922) as well as the relationship between the project and the Easter Rising, and lays the foundations of explorations in subsequent chapters of Yeats’s tower construction by stages from The Wild Swans at Coole (1919) to The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933).