What more is there to say ? Yeats’s questions

“Yeats is supremely the poet of questions” , writes Francis O’Gorman, identifying the interrogative streak that enlivens Yeats’s “passionate syntax”. But Yeats’s questions are not all alike. According to Brian Arkins, 42 poems in Yeats’s oeuvre close with questions, and “Questions play a crucial role in the poetry of Yeats: the lyrical sections of the poems contains 337 questions in its 374 poems”. It is the placement & proliferation of Yeats’s questions that see his use of this mark gain the significance of a signature as he makes the tone & meanings of his questions shift & change from line to line. Yeats’s questions defy easy answers. He refuses to make questions idly speculative or mere rhetorical flourish, forcing reconsideration of what it means to question in poetry. It is the drama of Yeats’s questions, how he builds towards interrogation rather than using them to elide difficulty, and in turn vexes & calms his poems, that is the focus of this essay.