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How William Butler Yeats’s Irish Identity Shaped his Poetry
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
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His first poems about romance mentioned grey hair and exhaustion even if he wrote them while still young, and they still portray his consciousness about old age (Hoffman 29). In his 60s, Yeats began to get sickly. Regardless of his deteriorated health, he spent the last fifteen years of his life as a lively man who had an extraordinary appetite for life. He still wrote plays about spiritualism. One time after a recovery from a severe sickness, he created a sequence of dynamic poetries that recounted about an old poor fictitious female called Silly Jane as an expression of happiness. The passion for poetry kept Yeats active in his career and was determined to ensure that sickness did not hinder his …show more content…
The Anglo-Irish Protestant marginal no longer had control over the Irish civilization and culture, and he felt more detached from the excellent achievement of the old Anglo-Irishmen after the death of the Protestant leaders. Yeats's views that were against democracy stated that the prominence of Anglo-Irishmen like Jonathan Swift, great philosophers, and the citizens like Edmund Burke juxtaposed severely through the ordinary normalness of the modern Irish community that appeared engrossed by the welfares of dealers and laborers. Yeats specified his shunned views in the last dramas like Agony (1938) and the theses of On the Reservoir (1939). Through his endeavors, Yeats helped to shape the Irish culture and left a
When You are Old, by William Butler Yeats, represents and elderly woman reminiscing of her younger days. A past lover whispers to her as she looks through a photo album. Basically, Yeats is showing that as the woman gets older, she is alone, but she does not have to be lonely. She will always have her memories for companionship.
After a four week survey of a multitude of children’s book authors and illustrators, and learning to analyze their works and the methods used to make them effective literary pieces for children, it is certainly appropriate to apply these new skills to evaluate a single author’s works. Specifically, this paper focuses on the life and works of Ezra Jack Keats, a writer and illustrator of books for children who single handedly expanded the point of view of the genre to include the experiences of multicultural children with his Caldecott Award winning book “Snowy Day.” The creation of Peter as a character is ground breaking in and of itself, but after reading the text the reader is driven to wonder why “Peter” was created. Was he a vehicle for political commentary as some might suggest or was he simply another “childhood” that had; until that time, been ignored? If so, what inspired him to move in this direction?
John Keats’s illness caused him to write about his unfulfillment as a writer. In an analysis of Keats’s works, Cody Brotter states that Keats’s poems are “conscious of itself as the poem[s] of a poet.” The poems are written in the context of Keats tragically short and painful life. In his ...
Yeats, William Butler. The De-Anglicizing of Ireland” in Yeats’s Poetry, Drama, and Prose. ed. Pethica, James. W.W. Norton & Company, USA, 2000.
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...
Unrequited love is a common theme in poetry. Nature, death, wars, religions are all significant themes but love is the most important. It gives the reader an insight to the author’s inner feelings. “When You Are Old” by William Butler Yeats is no exception. Yeats reflects upon his unconditional love for a woman who was not ready for a serious relationship.
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,?
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...
Douglas Hyde. Yeats was returned to Ireland in 1896. In the next ten years, Yeats was involved in the literary work related to Irish Literary revival and participated in founding the Abbey Theatre. Along with these poetic and playwright activities, Yeats was also involved in the politics and hold on a position of senator. He was developed his acclaim in the political sphere.
The poem starts off by “I know that I shall meet my fate” which employs a sense of resignation to fate – or death –, for it is the ultimate fate of all humanity. The author then immediately links the urging feeling of death to war, specifically World War I. Yeats portrays a soldier in a typical war situation, fighting for the “good” of the country he belongs to and love, but neither does he love his country nor does he feel emotionally connected to it, for the country referred to was Great Britain, the colonizers of Ireland at that time. According to Yeats, “Those that I fight I do not hate, those that I guard I do not love”. This exposes the hypocrisy of war, and the lack of noble purpose in wa...
The poem September 1913 focuses on the time where the Irish Independence was at its highest. Yeats repeats the phrase “romantic Ireland” a lot in this poem as it refers to the sacrifice of the materialistic things for independence and freedom. To further emphasize the importance and greatness of the revolution, Yeats pointed out the names of heroic individuals who gave their lives to fight for the cause. Yeats did not give any detail about the Irish heroes but he does state that “they have gone about the world like wind” (11). The heroes were so famous; their names could be heard and talked about all over the world. In this poem, Yeats does not go directly in to detail about the historical events that happened but fo...
William Butler Yeats is an Irish poet from the nineteenth century. William Butler Yeats was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1865. He was educated in both Dublin and London, and he wrote his first verse in 1877 (nobelprize.org). He wrote many poems during his lifetime, and is thought to be the most influential poet of his era. He was very influential in the Modernism era. William Butler Yeats was one of the most famous poets from the nineteenth century. Even though William Butler Yeats wrote both Victorian and Modernistic literature, he still had a large impact on the modernistic style. “After 1910, Yeats's dramatic art took a sharp turn toward a highly poetical, static, and esoteric style” (nobelprize.org). Even though Yeats was considered a patriot, “he deplored the hatred and bigotry of the Nationalist movement” This concern was new in the Modernism era. William was awarded the Nobel Prize for his artistic writing. “His significance today rests on his lyric achievement. His poetry, especially the volumes The Wild Swans at Coole (1919), Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921), The Tower (1928), The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933), and Last Poems and Plays (1940), made him one of the outstanding and most influential twentieth-century poets writing in English”.(nobelprize.org) An Irish Foresees his Airmen is a short poem that was written to commemorate Robert Gregory, the son of Yeats Patron, Lady (Poetry for students). This poem was first published in the collection of The Wild Swans at Coole. Yeats wrote two other poems about Robert Gregory, which are also included in The Wild Swans at Coole. The poem an Irish Airmen Foresees his Death is a poem written in the modernistic style, and displays it ...
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...
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.
death of a fellow poet, Auden may be lamenting the ultimate futility of Yeats’ life and art