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A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.

There you have in three lines, two and a half more precisely, a commanding summary of the myth and history of the Trojan war.

Both the myth and the history are the originating fountain of all Western literature. As the scale is to music, so the story of Troy is to all poetry.

Only a master poet can, in a handful of words, re-summon some of the original energy of that great fable, re-instate it as a living presence in a world centuries beyond its primal poetic exposition (in Homer) as William Butler Yeats did with Leda and the Swan.

What a bridging, what a connection (echoing E.M. Foster's famous injunction) he achieves between the (mythical) copulation of Zeus and Leda and the consequent razing of Troy and the fatal uxoricide of the great captain Agamemnon. So much in so little.

There is in these lines also the grandeur of the epic, the highest poetry according to the ancients.

Very much of Yeats has the true epic energy (though he eschewed, or the age he lived in was upropitious to, the epic form). No other modern poet — from Wordsworth onward — has such frequent access to the sublime.

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned

-- From The Second Coming

There is, further, the element of the premonitory "that warning voice" (Milton) in Yeats.

From The Second Coming, or Meditations in a Time or Civil War, or a dozen others, we hear the accents of prophecy, of violence to be "loosed" upon the world.

There sounds in many of Yeats's poems a terrifying apprehension ("the nightmare Rides upon sleep") of the world and history in shock, a precognition of the worst that mankind can (and has) done.

We read Yeats in the Holocaust, in Rwanda, Darfur, 9/11 — he is "alert" as only the rarest poets are.

Troy and Agamemnon are present. History is never done.

Yeats is very much the poet as seer. He is in this sense a throwback, or a last avatar, of (again) an originating idea of the poet and poetry: a daemon or god-inhabited vessel who "speaks" with a truth beyond the merely or purely mortal.

Which cues to another aspect of Yeats's pre-eminence.

Northrop Frye wrote once that listening to Mozart was like listening to the voice of Music itself. So with Yeats, there are times when reading him it is as if you are hearing Poetry's own voice.

He shares this property with so few others — Shakespeare in many lines, Milton in some, a gathering of a perfect lyrics by lucky lesser poets, the authors of so many great lines and passages of the King James Bible.

With Yeats at his best, then, and he is at his best profusely — not a costive poet like Eliot, or a cranky/spotty one like Pound — we encounter the very essence of what we mean by poetry, by art and the aesthetic sense.

He could not be omitted from any circle of the best without amputating something intrinsic to the idea and practice of poetry itself. That is how strong Yeats is.

Away from world themes and history, Yeats has a different but equally formidable expressive power. He has the Shakespearean gift of "inventing" proverbs, distilling common experience into lines of great precision, beauty or eloquence.

He has the widest rhetorical range of any poet since (and including) Wordsworth. From the mummering "bee-loud glade" of his early Celtic lyrics to the late ferocious anathema of this:

"There lurches past, his great eyes without thought
Under the shadow of stupid straw-pale locks
That insolent fiend Robert Artisson¡"

(Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen)

There is no tonal or metrical effect beyond him.

Finally, he is the artificer par excellence, the poet who played apprentice his whole life to the great craft of human verbal expression with restless diligence and genius. He learned the riddling commanding voice of the oracle and the whisper music of the lyric.

Yeats is the complete poet, His collected poems are one with the creations of Beethoven, Michelangelo and others of that peerless company. He easily belongs in any half-century of the greatest writers.

Rex Murphy is a commentator with CBC-TV's The National and host of CBC Radio's Cross-Country Checkup.