Langdon Hammer, teaching Yale's Modern Poetry (ENGL 310), spends this session on the early work of William Butler Yeats and his ambitions as a distinctly Irish poet. Hammer opens with the youthful narrative poem "King Goll" before turning to "The Song of the Wandering Aengus," read as a fable about poetic vocation built on symbol. He then traces a shift in Yeats's style through "A Coat," written after the exhausting effort to establish an Irish national theater, as the poet looks for a new audience and a plainer voice. The lecture closes with "The Fisherman," shown as a deliberate revision of the Aengus poem that reflects Yeats's changed concerns. Close reading of the poems anchors the whole session, with Hammer walking through language and imagery line by line to show how Yeats's sense of his audience and his craft evolved.