Yeats & Allusions

One thing that I noticed about Yeats' poetry as a whole is his love of allusions. Yeats uses extensive allusions to fairy tales, mythological creatures/gods, the Bible, and ancient places. In "The Tower," Yeats is focusing on growing older, so I suppose that some of these topics are attractive components since they never grow old--and, in the case of ancient places--have already experienced 'death.' However, in terms of the modern reader, it is difficult to recognize all of Yeats' references. In a lot of the poems, without a lot of knowledge about mythology, the Bible, etc., the poem loses a lot of meaning.

For example, in one poem ("Two Songs from a Play"), Yeats mentions Dionysus, Muses, Magnus Annus, Troy, Argo, Roman Empire, the Galilee sea, Babylonia, Plato, Christ, and Doric. In another, "Leda and the Swan" Yeats depicts the Greek myth about Leda and Zeus...which, if it weren't for my Spanish lit class where we discussed how the swan is a symbol of Spanish modernism, I would not have had a point of reference to draw conclusions about the poem. The question is, at what point should the author be conscious of whether or not the reader has knowledge of included allusions? How immediately accessible does the imagery need to be?