This lecture puts forward the idea that Yeats's Revivalism lies at the heart of his modernism rather than at the "pre-modernist" periphery of his early career. For Yeats, as for so many of his contemporaries, Revival was not a form of nostalgia, in which the past was cut off from experience; nor was it nostalgia in the sense of longing of a time that never was. Rather it was a deliberate attitude toward time, in which a "backward glance" brought the past into a present moment of critical reflection.