Literary critics who have written on the poetry of W. B. Yeats are almost invariably confronted with the difficulty of attributing unity to a body of work that modifies its Romantic affiliations and often acquires, in mid-career, an ironic and realistic tinge. Can this trajectory be explained due to the poet’s association with Modernism or with authors who contributed to the new poetry during its formative phase? This chapter provides formal analyses of key poems, not to argue that Yeats became part of a literary current that sometimes ran counter to his deepest tendencies but to show how Modernist poetics was uniquely singularized in his own writing. Poems have been chosen to clarify Yeats’s own relationship to issues that appear in Modernist writing while also suggesting how the poet’s commitments are not only personal and political but acquire shape on a formal basis. Three issues are taken up with regard to Yeats’s poetry, namely, the issue of poetic revision, the movement away from mimetic realism and, finally, the role of performativity in a poetics of self as it allows us to foreground a unique subject-position and a peculiar mode of the postcolonial.