Leda and the Swan / Yeats

"Leda and the Swan" is a sonnet by William Butler Yeats first published in the Dial in 1924, ad reprinted in his 1928 collection, The Tower. Combining psychological realism with a mystic vision, it describes the swan's rape of Leda. It also suggests that this event leads to the murder of Agamemnon by Clytemnestra (the latter being the daughter of Leda).

The poem is regularly praised as one of Yeats's masterpieces. Camille Paglia, who called the poem "the greatest poem of the twentieth century," and said "all human beings, like Leda, are caught up moment by moment in the 'white rush' of experience. For Yeats, the only salvation is the shapeliness and stillness of art."