the tower






W.B. Yeats, from "The Tower."

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Immediately after World War I, four major European and American poets and thinkers — W. B. Yeats, Robinson Jeffers, R. M. Rilke, and C. G. Jung — moved into towers as their principal habitations ... in every case the tower served both literally and symbolically as a refuge from the urban modernism with whose values the four writers found themselves at odds. While the classic modernists (Eliot, Woolf, Hart Crane) often singled out the broken tower as the image of a crumbling past, these writers actualized their powerful visions: Yeats and Rilke moved into medieval towers in Ireland and Switzerland, while Jeffers and Jung built themselves towers at Carmel and Bollingen as secluded spaces in which to cultivate the traditions and values they cherished.
Description of The View From the Tower: Origins of an Antimodernist Image by Theodore Ziolkowski.

Photo of Robinson Jeffers' Hawk Tower by Jessica Malikowski. Book and image discovered thanks to Stephen Sparks.