"Man has created death", wrote Yeats, and in this book Jahan Ramazani argues that the effort to create and recreate death is the major impulse of Yeats' poetry. According to Ramazani, death was Yeats' muse, and his best poems are his vexed meditations on loss, ruin, and oblivion. Ramazanu reviews Yeats' elegies, his self-elegies, and his poems in the sublime mode, as well as his work in such related modes as love lyric and prophecy, carpe diem and the curse. Balancing genre criticism with close revisionist readings of individual poems, he traces interrelations between the lyrics and the traditions that inspired them. Ramazani interprets the psychological, ontological, and rhetorical patterns and intricacies of the poet's responses to the "great night". He analyzes Yeats' contributions to the Romantic and modern poetry of death by drawing on a variety of theorists, including Freud and Heidegger, Levi-Strauss and Blanchot, Adorno and de Man.