William Butler Yeats.
William Butler Yeats was the major figure in the cultural revolution which developed from the strong nationalistic movement at the end of the 19th century. He dominated the writings of a generation. He established forms and themes which came to be considered as the norms for writers of his generation.
Yeats was a confessional poet - that is to say, that he wrote his poetry directly from his own experiences. He was an idealist, with a purpose. This was to create Art for his own people - the Irish. But in so doing, he experienced considerable frustration and disillusionment. The tension between this ideal, and the reality is the basis of much of his writing. One central theme of his earlier poetry is the contrast between the aims he, and others, such as Lady Gregory, had for their movement, and the reality. He had hoped to provide an alternative to nationalism fuelled mainly by hatred for Britain, through the rebirth and regeneration of an ancient Irish culture, based on myth and legend. Instead, he found that the response of the newly emerging Irish Catholic middle class to their work, varied between indifference and outrage. On the one hand, their indifference was displayed by their refusal to fund a gallery for the Hugh Lane collection of Art, and on the other hand, they rioted in outrage at Synge's Playboy of the Western World.
The tension between Yeats' ideal, and the reality is developed in the Fisherman and September 1913. Both these poems deal with Yeats attempts to bring Art to the people of Ireland, and the negative response of Irish society.
September 1913.
Here, Yeats directs his passionate rage against the Irish Catholic middle class. He perceives them as Philistines, whose values are monetary and religious, not artistic. His scorn for their petty money grubbing - dry the marrow from the bone and their narrow selfish piety
Prayer to shivering prayer is set in contrast to his admiration for the heroes of old.
Yet they were of a different kind.
These patriots had loved Ireland with a passion which consumed them, and for which no sacrifice was too great.
For whom the hangman's rope was spun.
But the present materialistic age has no place for such men of courage and idealism. Their age is past. It's
With O'Leary in the grave.
Self sacrifice and patriotism are dead. Consequently, he dismisses the Ireland of his day with ...
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...Blind Man stole the bread' were 'Heart mysteries' -that is, having their origins in human emotions, he sacrificed the man to the artist:
'Players and painted stage took all my love,
And not those things that they were emblems of".
The joy of creation increasingly absorbed him, not the living of life.
Character isolated by a deed
To engross the present and dominate memory.
These images were 'masterful' - under the Ringmaster's control. And they 'grew in pure mind' -increasingly they were the product of his intellect, not his emotions. But now they have gone - they've deserted him, or perhaps he has deserted them, seeing them in all their artificiality. So he is left with no option but to return to what he has avoided - the world of feeling, of emotion. His ladder out of that tangled world of human emotion, has gone. He's left at the bottom of the ladder, with his feet on the ground. He uses the powerful metaphor of litter -
'old kettles, old bones, old rags' to suggest the ugliness of human feeling. But, he must confront the reality of life and living at last - he must return to the source of all art, the world of human emotion-
'The foul rag and boneshop of the heart'.
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...
In regard to the Nationalists, he incorporates traditional Irish characters, such as Fergus and the Druids, to create an Irish mythology and thereby foster a national Irish identity. After the division of the Cultural Nationalists, Yeats feels left behind by the movement and disillusioned with their violent, "foolish" methods. He is also repeatedly rejected by Gonne. These efforts to instigate change through poetry both fail, bringing the function of the poet and his poetry into question. If these unfruitful poems tempt him from his ?craft of verse,?
It has been acknowledged by many scholars that Yeats' study of Blake greatly influenced his poetic expression. This gives rise to the widely held assertion that Yeats is indebted to Blake. While I concur with this assertion, I feel that the perhaps greater debt is Blake's.
In “Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop” Yeats employs two themes, the theme of good versus evil, and the theme of sexuality. He conveys the theme of good versus evil through the Bishop’s statements in the first stanza, as well as J...
Keats, John. “The Eve of St. Agnes”. The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Romantic
William Yeats is deliberated to be among the best bards in the 20th era. He was an Anglo-Irish protestant, the group that had control over the every life aspect of Ireland for almost the whole of the seventeenth era. Associates of this group deliberated themselves to be the English menfolk but sired in Ireland. However, Yeats was a loyal affirmer of his Irish ethnicity, and in all his deeds, he had to respect it. Even after living in America for almost fourteen years, he still had a home back in Ireland, and most of his poems maintained an Irish culture, legends and heroes. Therefore, Yeats gained a significant praise for writing some of the most exemplary poetry in modern history
...at "more than their rhyming tell" ("To Ireland", 20). Yeats investment in the mystical Order of the Golden Dawn deepens his symbolic resources, extending his fascination with Celtic mythology into a syncretic spirituality which stresses the Jewish mystical doctrine known as the Kaballah. Through a combination of highly accessible rhyming and metrical poetry with such esoteric systems Yeats is able to construct a dual-level poetics in which readily traceable meanings are amplified by an acquaintance with the symbolic systems Yeats spent a great deal of his life mastering. His investment in these symbolic systems, and their ability to invoke unseen spiritual forces instantiates the poet's resistance to certain developments of modernity - such as the stress on reason, urbanity and individuality - and makes his poetic work a central aspect of his magico-religious Work.
Throughout many of his poems, W.B Yeats portrayed important aspects of Ireland’s history especially around the 1900’s when Ireland was fighting for independence. During this time, Ireland was going through an agonizing time of struggle. The Employers’ Federation decided to lock out their workers in order to break their resistance. By the end of September, 25,000 workers were said to have been affected. Although the employers’ actions were widely condemned, they refused to consider negotiation or compromise with the Union. His readers are able to see how Yeats reflects the political, cultural, and societal atmosphere in Ireland during the early 1900’s. The poems September 1913 and Easter 1916 both reflect the political, cultural, and societal atmospheres that were found in Ireland around the 1900’s.
MANDERS. It would be grievous indeed, if absence and absorption in art that sort of things were to blunt his natural feelings (I.24)
This refrain enforces his disgust at the type of money hungry people that the Irish have become. In the third and fourth stanza, however, Yeats completely changes the tone of his poetry. He praises the romantics of Irish history, such as Rob...
Keats, John. “Letters: To George and Thomas Keats.” The Norton Anthology: English Literature. Ninth Edition. Stephen Greenblatt, eds. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2012. 967-968. Print.
The various levels of interpretation that a poet, such as W.B.Yeats, welcomes to his poems is difficult to grasp upon first reading his poetry. What appears to be a straight forward poem, such as, An Irish Airman Foresees His Death, is actually an intellectual cultural criticism of Yeats’ modern day society. The poem, written as a testament to Lady Gregory’s son, captures the innermost concerns and perceptions of an Irish airman in World War I. However, through Yeats’ sentimental and poetic style, the poem incorporates a double meaning, and hence, focuses on Irish nationalism and its lack of an international consciencesness. The airman is Ireland personified, and his outlook on war and society is a window into the desolate situation that Ireland faces.
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.
Yeats and Eliot are two chief modernist poet of the English Language. Both were Nobel Laureates. Both were critics of Literature and Culture expressing similar disquietude with Western civilization. Both, prompted by the Russian revolution perhaps, or the violence and horror of the First World War, pictured a Europe that was ailing, that was literally falling apart, devoid of the ontological sense of rational purpose that fuelled post-Enlightenment Europe and America(1). All these similar experience makes their poetry more valuable to compare and to contrast since their thoughts were similar yet one called himself Classicist(Eliot) who wrote objectively and the other considered himself "the last Romantic" because of his subjective writing and his interest in mysticism and the spiritual. For better understanding of these two poets it is necessary to mention some facts and backgrounds on them which influenced them to incorporate similar (to some extent) historical motif in their poetry.
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.