Coda: Building by ‘the Flooded Stream’: Agency and Contingency in Yeats’s Tower Project

This last chapter puts the long trajectory of Yeats’s seventeen-year work of textual representations of the tower into perspective. Yeats’s emphasis on construction is a counterpoint to destruction in the midst of the ‘flooded stream’ of Irish history, and a repeated pattern of interaction between the poet’s agency and contingency is characteristically recognizable. Yeats’s tower poems, all those step-by-step construction works amid destructive forces of conflicts, formed an epoch in his career, with the tower as a crucial organizing principle building his later poetry.