In the following essay, Hunter examines what Innisfree symbolizes to Yeats as a poet.

In an attempt to explain the nature of the attraction he feels toward the Devon farm he calls Thorncombe, the protagonist of John Fowles' Daniel Martin refers to a passage in Restif de la Bretonne's eighteenth-century romanced autobiography, Monsieur Nicholas, in which the speaker describes the feeling of total peace and joy found in a remote, lush, hidden valley in the Burgundian hills. Fowles' protagonist, after pointing out that the Frenchman "baptized the place simply la bonne vaux: the valley of abundance, the sacred combe," goes on to describe the general nature of such places as "outside the normal world, intensely private and enclosed, intensely green and fertile, numinous, haunted and haunting, dominated by a sense of magic that is also a sense of a mysterious yet profound parity in all existence." In...