Romantic image

Kermode maintains that Yeats's images and symbols define the Romantic tradition-the preference for images over formal reasoning as a way to reconcile opposites. Yeats's poetry, for all its mythical, classical, and historical allusions,its occultism and arcana, values imagination over intellection, and the resonant image over the plain statement. Organic images, as distinct from descriptive or ornamental images, generate symbolic ripples. Kermode holds that Yeats's recurrent, almost obsessive images, such as tree, bird, tower, and dancer, reach a high point of Romantic imagery and organic form. The pre-eminent example of symbolic images (archetypes), is the dancer and the dance at the end of "Among School Children," an image that reconciles body and soul, identity and action, artist and art. Kermode's study is a standard in Yeats criticism.