The twentieth-century debate between modernist and postcolonial scholars around the figure of W.B. Yeats should move beyond purely modern or postcolonial frameworks. Yeats’s poems can be read as meditations through which the Irish poet both anticipates the promise of a postcolonial, modern world, and yet remains attached to the lasting structures of its twinned dark excess: coloniality. As such, it is necessary to read Yeats as a poet confronted by a modernity that disguises its coloniality, or put another way, to conceptualize a heterogeneous reading of Yeats that goes beyond the purely emancipatory readings offered by previous readers of his oeuvre.