Keane's subject is the fruitful tension between tradition and the poet's indivual talent, his legacy as it is made new in particular poems. In examining the poetry of William Butler Yeats, Keane traces literary, philosophic, and spiritual interactions to suggest how certain poems came to be, both thematically and verbally. In doing so, he engages not only Yeats's words but also the larger structures of the Yeatsian imagination by taking into account the poet's allusive encounters with the traditions - Neo-Platonism and Romanticism above all - in which he was rooted and in the context of which he intended his work to be read.