of Postmodern literature suggesting that "The Circus Animals' Desertion" is a poem about writing poems. He claims that the subject portrays a withdrawal from Modernist literature and the themes of Yeats' earlier works. Michael O'Neil argues that the poem attempts to fill the gaps between Yeats's emotions and the poetry they had inspired over his lifetime, as he was in his seventies when it was composed. O'Neil suggests that the poet is tired at the time the poem is written and is searching for a "new source of creativity," only in "The Circus Animals' Desertion," that inspiration comes from a critical analysis of his previous works. In Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form, critic Helen Vendler suggests that the poem is a recognition of Yeats changing from one position in society to another as he moves from the prominent poet who plays the role of the ringmaster in a circus to an elderly man with writer's block who must recycle the themes of his past works. Vendler analyzes the references of The Countess Cathleen and Oisin throughout the poem and puts particular emphasis on the narrator's critique of his previous works, arguing that the tone of the poem is highly retrospective. Notes References Jeffares, Alexander Norman. A commentary on the collected poems of W.B. Yeats. Stanford University Press (1968) Koenigsberger, Kurt. The novel and the Menagerie: Totality, Englishness, and Empire. Ohio State University Press (2007) Ingersol, Earl. "Yeats and Postmodernism". Notes on Modern Irish Literature. Edward A. Kopper, Jr. (2001)/University of Michigan (2008) O'Neil, Michael. "The Circus Animals' Desertion". Romanticism and the Self-Conscious Poem. Clarendon Press (1997) Finneran, Richard. Yeats: An Annual of Critical and Textual Studies 1995. University of Michigan Press (1998) p. 202 Vendler, Helen. Our Secret Discipline:Yeats and the Lyric Form. Belnap (2007) External links Text of poem Irish poems Poetry by W. B. Yeats 1939 poems