Yeats, the last Romantic?

Can't resist, it's Yeats again! I have loved for so long the magnificent poem "Coole Park and Ballylee 1931", which is a tribute to his Patron, Lady Gregory, written during the last months of her final illness. Coole Park is her estate, a grand ancestral house in Ireland, and her decline and death coincide, for Yeats, with the demise of wider traditions, including romanticism. The line "We were the last romantics", so simple, resounds in the heart and mind, and stays there. Here is the final verse:

We were the last romantics - chose for theme
Traditional sanctity and loveliness;
Whatever's written in what poets name
The book of the people; whatever most can bless
The mind of man or elevate a rhyme;
But all is changed, that high horse riderless,
Though mounted in that saddle Homer rode
Where the swan drifts upon a darkening flood.

He laments the end of a millennia-long tradition of noble verse, and its themes of "sanctity" and "loveliness" - beauty - whose role is to edify mankind, "bless the mind of man...". What a powerful image it is to evoke a riderless horse, once ridden by the father of Western poetry, Homer. And the image of drifting, directionless swans on dark waters only goes to reinforce the sense of desolation. 

It is interesting too that he talks of "the book of the people", as it is for the poets to speak to the people. As Wordsworth says in his Preface. As Shakespeare himself did and still does.

This is Yeats at the height of his creative powers.