Style

Abstract

Yeats was perhaps the twentieth century’s finest stylist. At the end of his essay ‘William Blake’ he quotes his great predecessor’s remarks on style:

‘I have heard people say, “Give me the ideas; it is no matter what words you put them into”; and others say, “Give me the design; it is no matter for the execution” … Ideas cannot be given but in their minutely appropriate words, nor can a design be made without its minutely appropriate execution.’ (C, p. 32)

This is Yeats’s position too. For him, poetry is ‘the natural words in the natural order’; and this goes all the way down to the most ‘minutely appropriate’ level. Even punctuation is part of a poem’s form.