This essay aims to find a correlation between the poetry of William Butler Yeats and the social-cultural context of its time-period. With the aid of conceptual history, representations of fundamental concepts can be revealed in the written text. The methodological approach is based on Reinhart Koselleck's Begriffsgeschichte where concepts are used for timing history. The two concepts in focus in the essay are 'crisis' and 'the Golden Age'. The results found in the analysis of Yeats' poems displayed to a high amount the representation of the concept of 'crisis', revealing that crisis in the society at that time is reflected in Yeats' poems, but representations of the counter-concept 'the Golden Age' was only partly found in poems from his later collections. A suggestion for further research is to perform a study where several contemporary poets are investigated simultaneously with the aid of conceptual history.