A study of all of the poems Yeats wished to include in his volume of collected poetry, which reveals a canon carefully constructed to tell a dramatic-mimetic story. Not only in the poems, but in the spaces between, Adams finds the creating life of the fictive poet named Yeats - shaped, over the years, as the author Yeats revised and ordered his poems to tell this story. Many have commented on the significance of the order of Yeats' poems. This study articulates this significance poem by poem for all of the poet's work. While providing a comprehensive reading of the poems, Adam's commentary is informed by the current theoretical, critical and scholarly debates surrounding both the text of Yeats' poems and the nature of textuality itself.