Why would you describe W.B Yeats Work and modernism

[Reena47]

Hey could any one tell my why they would describe Yeats poem A Coat as a modernist piece of text and what modernist textual features it has.

Thanks

Kat

[FrozenDuchess]

A COAT

I MADE my song a coat
Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies
From heel to throat;
But the fools caught it,
Wore it in the world's eyes
As though they'd wrought it.
Song, let them take it,
For there's more enterprise
In walking naked.



I know I am late but here is my take on this: The Yeatsian aesthetic moves from a movement of longing to one of affirmation. Yeats's early work have often been described as being of a decidedly "Romantic" posture. Indeed, his earlier poems from the Rose or Crossways were 'embroidered' and often not an inspection of himself. The difference (it has been said) between romantics and modernists is that romantics rely on the imagination while modernists rely on memory. Early on Yeats's work was no reflection of himself, later on his work progressed to be a reflection of himself (this particularly illustrated by Lapis Lazuli).

If you look his early works you may find archaisms, mythologies, rhetorics and ballad like repetitions. These mark Romantic poems, but later Yeats realizes himself in his poetry, this poem "A Coat" is a later poem one of the modernist ones because it lacks the romantic aspects mentioned above and it relies on the poet and his thoughts and 'memories' so to speak.

Once again I am probably too late, but hey I love talking about Yeats.