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The Feminine in William Butler Yeats' Poetry William Butler Yeats had a long history of involvement with women. He was deeply affected by all types of women; from love interests with Mrs. Olivia Shakespear, Maud Gonne and her adopted daughter Iseult, to a partnership and friendship with Lady Gregory, to marriage with Georgie Hyde-Lees, and finally the birth of his own daughter Anne Yeats. These relationships are reflected in his poetry on many different and multi-layered levels. The mentions of women in his work gives the readers some historical content as well as show the development of his feminine idea. As different as his many relationships with women were, so was his reflection of them in his writing. Yeats took people he knew and transformed them into images and patterns of order (Unterecker 12). In this case, it is important to notice Yeats's use of biography within his poetry. In 1889, Yeats was introduced to Maud Gonne who became a central part of his life and major theme in his work. She was an adamant Irish nationalist and a beautiful woman to Yeats. He pursued her much of his life, only to be rejected repeatedly by her. In 1894 he met Mrs. Olivia Shakespear whom he regarded as a confidant, despite their short affair. Yeats found friendship and maternal caring in Lady Gregory. "She became for him an image of aristocratic courtesy" (Untereker 14). Yeats spent time at her estate, Coole Park, and traveled often with Lady Gregory and her son Robert. He became director of Abbey Theatre with Lady Gregory in 1906. In 1911 he met George Hyde-Lees and due to the encouragement of Mrs. Shakespear and Lady Gregory he proposes. Yeats married Georgia Hyde-Lees and on February 24, 1919 their daughter Anne was bo... ... middle of paper ... ...ess. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Jeffares, Norman A. A New Commentary on the Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1984. Keane, Patrick J. Yeats, Joyce, Ireland, and the Myth of the Devouring Female. MO: University of Missouri Press, 1988. Kline, Gloria C. The Last Courtly Lover: Yeats and the Idea of Woman. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1983. Stubbings, Diane. Anglo-Irish Modernism and the Maternal: From Yeats to Joyce. New York: Palgrave, 2000. Unterecker, John. A Reader's Guide to William Butler Yeats. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1996. Whitaker, Thomas R. Swan and Shadow: Yeats's Dialogue with History. Durham, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1964. Yeats, W.B. The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats. Ed. Richard J. Finneran. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996.
Yeats, William Butler. "Into the Twilight." The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. eds. Richard Ellman and Robert O'Clair. New York: Norton & Company, 1988.
The tales were rediscovered around 1880 inspiring the Irish literary revival in romantic fiction by writers such as Lady Augusta Gregory and the poetry and dramatic works of W.B. Yeats. These works wer...
Keats, John. “The Eve of St. Agnes.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Vol II, Ed. MH Abrams, et al. New York; Norton 2000. Pg 834-844.
Keats, John. Bright Star: Love Letters and Poems of John Keats to Fanny Brawne. New
Wilberg, Jonah. "Keats to Autumn Analysis." Humanities 360. N.p., 8 Jan. 2011. Web. 18 Dec. 2013.
Finneran, Richard J. The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. 2nd Ed. New York: Simon and Schuster Inc., 1996.
Keats, John. “The Eve of St. Agnes”. The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Romantic
All in all, Yeat’s poems: “When you are Old”, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”, “The Wild Swans at Coole”, “The Second Coming”, and “Sailing to Byzantium” all show the struggle and opposition between change and stability in the world. Yeats uses imagery, language, and ideas to represent change and changelessness just like the critic, Richard Ellmann, said. Yeats’ philosophy on the conflict of opposites by using gyres shows us how different forces struggle against one another, just like the development of a personality or the rise and fall of a new civilization.
William Butler Yeats was born on June thirteenth, eighteen sixty-five, at ten-forty pm, in Sandymount, Dublin (Foster, 13). He grew up lanky, untidy, slightly myopic, and extremely thin. He had black hair, high cheek bones, olive skin, and slanting eyes (Foster, 34). It was presumed he was Tubercular. As a child he was ridiculed, mainly because of his Irish heritage (Foster, 16). He accomplished many things in his life time.
power.” The English Review 13.1 (2002): 17+. General OneFile. Web. 10 Jan. 2014. Shmoop Editorial Team. “John Keats: Biography.” Shmoop.com. Shmoop University, 11 Nov.
Works Cited Keats, John. John Keats – The Major Works.
“Sailing to Byzantium”, published in 1928, “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death”, published in 1919, and “The Second Coming”, published in 1920, are all some of the most highly regarded works of William Butler Yeats. Although each poem seemingly contains its own personal ideas and focus on particular topics, one common theme is found throughout all three: death. In “Sailing to Byzantium” Yeats discusses the matter of growing old and attempting to find a way to live eternally after death has taken its toll, while in “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” he creates an internal dialogue of an Irish airman as he feels he is about to take his final flight into death, and lastly in “The Second Coming” he creates an allegory for post-war Ireland by alluding to the Apocalypse. Each of these poems is popular not only due to the incredible manner in which they were written, but rather, due to the voice in which Yeats discusses each of the poem’s respective subjects. Through his modernist style, yet traditional form, William Butler Yeats wrote “Sailing to Byzantium”, “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death”, and “The Second Coming” as an attempt to answering the difficult questions that surround death in a way which resonated so strongly onto the audience that continues its legacy to this day.
Author of poetry, William Butler Yeats, wrote during the twentieth century which was a time of change. It was marked by world wars, revolutions, technological innovations, and also a mass media explosion. Throughout Yeats poems he indirectly sends a message to his readers through the symbolism of certain objects. In the poems The Lake Isle of Innisfree, The wild Swans at Cole, and Sailing to Byzantium, all by William Yeats expresses his emotional impact of his word choices and symbolic images.
On the surface, William Butler Yeats’s poem No Second Troy, tells the narrative of a man questioning his unrequited loves morality and ideology. However, further reading of the poem gives the reader insight into Yeats’s own feelings towards Irish radical, Maud Gonne, a woman to whom he proposed on numerous occasions unsuccessfully. Gonne had always been more radical than Yeats within her efforts to secure Ireland’s independence from Britain in the first decades of the 20th century, but Yeats persisted in receiving her love, dedicating many of his poems to her, thus showing his obsession to the radical actress. The poem can be split into four rhetorical questions; first the speaker asks “why” he should blame her, for his own unhappiness; next he questions “what” else she could have done with her “noble” mind; following this, the speaker, seemingly speaking to himself, accepts that she is who she is and that cannot be changed, lastly the speaker questions whether there is anything else that could have been an outlet for her “fiery” temperament.
W. B. Yeats is one of the foremost poets in English literature even today. He was considered to be one of the most important symbolists of the 20th century. He was totally influenced by the French movement of the 19th century. He was a dreamer and visionary, who was fascinated by folk-lore, ballad and superstitions of the Irish peasantry. Yeats poems are fully conversant with the Irish background, the Irish mythologies etc. Yeats has tried to bring back the “simplicity” and “altogetherness” of the earlier ages and blend it with the modern ideas of good and evil. Almost all his poems deal with ancient Ireland ...