When he began publishing in the 1890s, he was interested in poetic technique, co-founding the Rhymers' Club to create a society of similar poets. He soon abandoned the elaborate, stylized techniques of his first book of poetry, "The Wind among the Reeds," opting instead for colloquial rhythms and speech patterns. These techniques would later crop up in modernist poets like W. H. Auden, William Carlos Williams, and Robert Frost, also known for their use of a regional layman's diction.
Like modernists Williams, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound, Yeats' poetry was often self-aware, in some cases taking on the idea of technique as its subject matter. While he did not make the kind of grand statement as did Williams with his "no ideas but in things," found in the poem "A Sort of a Song," Yeats did write poems that address his personal style on small levels, such as "A Coat," in which he announced that he would cease to inform his poems with what he called "old mythologies." Like Williams and H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), he chose to express himself in a simplified verse form.
Modernist poets differed greatly from the Romantics and Victorians in that they chose neither personal, confessional expressions associated with the former, nor the nationalistic poetry found in the latter. Rather, they were quick to question the politics of the day, especially when it came to war and rebellion, as in Yeats' "The Second Coming," written soon after World War I. Yeats' "Easter, 1916," one of his best-known poems, expresses bluntly his admiration for Irish revolutionaries like John MacBride, who was involved in the unsuccessful 1916 Easter Rising and was later executed. The "terrible beauty" that is born in the poem serves almost as a threat to British imperialism, and perhaps references Yeats' own related decision to move back to Ireland from England and concentrate his themes on Irish concerns.
Yeats was squarely against the type of overly intellectualized and objectified poetry which was the trademark of the T. S. Eliot school. Rather than embrace Eliot's objective correlative as did Auden and Pound, he considered that style to be obscure and obfuscating. He did not like Eliot's "The Waste Land," considering it too dry and quasi-intellectual (See References 1). As a reaction, he aimed to create poetry that was based on energy and excitement, not scientific objectivity. He did, however, believe in the modernist technique of taking the personal and finding a way to make it universal through poetry.
Yeats received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923. Some of his books of poetry, namely "The Tower" and "The Wild Swans at Coole" are considered among the best of the 20th century. In his later years, after he was elected to a political position, he began to view literary modernism with a sense of nostalgia, but according to The Poetry Foundation, it no longer held any attraction for him; he developed a preference for traditional rhyme and strict stanzas that went against the tenets of modern poetry (See References 1).