Although Yeats' poetic technique couldn't be called Avant-garde (since he generally wrote metrically regular verse and frequently used fixed poetic forms), he shared some of the major concerns of the Modernists—like isolation and a preoccupation with history. Plus, he's a little bit of genius. They don't hand out Nobel Prizes like candy, after all.

"The Second Coming"

This poem was written in the aftermath of World War I, and can be said to speak for the generation when it announces, "Things fall apart. The centre cannot hold." Yikes. That sounds Modernist to us.

"Sailing to Byzantium"

In the Romantic period, Keats wrote his "Ode to a Nightingale", in which a bird's song was able to lift the poet to new heights of art. For Yeats, nature can't do that trick anymore. Only art can.

In this poem, the aging narrator wishes to be transformed into a work of art: a mechanized songbird rather than a real one.

"The Song of the Wandering Aengus"

Yeats is adding his own contribution to traditional stories about a Celtic god of youth and beauty in this lovely early poem.