W. B. Yeats purchased the Norman tower of Thoor Ballylee in Co. Galway in 1917 for £35 and restored it as his family home, living there intermittently until 1928. The sixteenth-century tower — a simple Irish fortification known as a tower house — became the central symbol of his late poetry, representing ancestral tradition, aristocratic dignity, spiritual quest, and the poet's lonely vigil above the tumult of the modern world. His collections The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair (1933) take their titles from the building.

Thoor Ballylee and Yeats's tower poems represent the most sustained and profound use of a personal castle as poetic symbol in the twentieth century. 'The Tower', 'Meditations in Time of Civil War', 'Blood and the Moon', and 'The Winding Stair' use the stone tower as a vehicle for meditations on history, violence, art, and the afterlife of civilisations. Yeats's tower influenced Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, and countless other poets who sought in fortified buildings a metaphor for the poet's embattled creative stance.