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W.b yeats as a symbolist poet
Yeats poetry essay
The Life and Works of W.B. Yeats
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In analysing the poetry of W.B. Yeats, I have come to understand the multiple conflicting themes and positions he presents in his poetry. However, my understanding has been influenced most by Yeats’s exploration of key conflicts in ageing along with political anarchy. These are conveyed respectively in the poems “Wild Swans at Coole” (1916) and “Leda and the Swan” (1923), using the central symbol of the swan. In “Wild Swans at Coole”, Yeats conveys the conflict within his heart; where he is an ageing, old man opposed to the young, revitalised swans. He laments the loss of his playful energy which he sees in the abundance of love and vitality in the swans. In “Leda and the Swan”, Yeats conveys the political dichotomy of the Irish nationalistic struggle against the opposing British suppression; exemplified by the swan’s advances towards the vulnerable Leda.
Yeats presents the key conflict of ageing through exploring his own life in decline compared to the spiritual transcendence of the swans in “Wild Swans at Coole”. Yeats wrote this poem in October 1916 after his latest rejection by Maud Gonne, following the death of her husband, John MacBride, in the Easter Rebellion. Yeats therefore reflects on the inertia of his own life, while regathering himself at Lady Gregory’s Coole Park estate. While revolving around the idea that sexual fulfilment with Maud has been lost. Yeats retains the last of his romantic preoccupations in perceiving a spiritual element through the natural world, where nature is reflective of youth and beauty. The main way this is conveyed is through the swans, symbolising youth, vitality and freedom, the conflicting position to Yeats’s personal state.
Yeats conveys this through a reflective, sorrowful tone, as h...
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...he spiritual element of life, discovered through the natural world with “Wild Swans at Coole”, and history with “Leda and the Swan”.
Works Cited
1. Bogan, L., 1938, “William Butler Yeats”, The Atlantic Monthly, May 1938, accessed 8 June 2012, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1938/05/william-butler-yeats/4672/
2. Holstad, S., n.d., "Yeats's 'Leda and the Swan’: Psycho-Sexual Therapy in Action", California State University, accessed 8 June 2012, http://www-scf.usc.edu/~erdemoz/Write/leda.html
3. “Modernist Poetry 2: W. B. Yeats”, lecture by Dr. Aaron Kelly, 20th April 2004, from the green booklet “Module B: The Critical Study of Texts: William Butler Yeats”.
4. Morrison, A., 1998, “Theories of Post-Coloniality: Edward W. Said and W.B. Yeats", The Imperial Archive Project, accessed 9 June 2012, http://www.qub.ac.uk/imperial/ireland/saidyeat.htm
Keats uses the song of the nightingale as his vehicle to a perfect, nature infused realm. Throughout the poem Keats has given his own personal opinion of the nightingale’s song. He uses a supernatural mythical creature in order to demonstrate that song is transporting him into a different realm. Keats identifies the perfect world when he wrote “That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees In some melodious plot Of beechen green, and shadows numberless, Singest of summer in full-throated ease.” Keats is comparing the nightingale to a Dryad and using personification to put forward this idea that the nightingale song is leading him to a perfect world of summer time. In the background the Drayad and the song are together in order to demonstrate how these put together will further explain Keats idea to a perfect world. Therefore the nightingale’s song has the ability to be this bird that would sing this perfect song but it can also be the symbol of
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...
Rovee, Christopher. "Trashing Keats." ELH: English Language History 74.4 (Winter 2008): 993-1022. Project MUSE. Web.
The poem Leda and the Swan is about the rape of Leda committed by Zeus in disguise as a swan. Because of what they have done, it sets history in motion. Thus, it's fated that Helen will launch the war of a thousand ships, how Troy will fall, and Agamemnon will be murdered,...etc.
Wilberg, Jonah. "Keats to Autumn Analysis." Humanities 360. N.p., 8 Jan. 2011. Web. 18 Dec. 2013.
In these lines from "All Things can Tempt Me" (40, 1-5), Yeats defines the limitations of the poet concerning his role in present time. These "temptations" (his love for the woman, Maude Gonne, and his desire to advance the Irish Cultural Nationalist movement) provide Yeats with the foundation upon which he identifies his own limitations. In his love poetry, he not only expresses his love for Gonne, he uses his verse to influence her feelings, attempting to gain her love and understanding. 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,? then what is the true nature verse and why is it a ?toil? for the poet? Also, if Yeats cannot use poetry to influence the world around him, then what is his role as a poet?
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
In order to experience true sorrow one must feel true joy to see the beauty of melancholy. However, Keats’s poem is not all dark imagery, for interwoven into this poem is an emerging possibility of resurrection and the chance at a new life. The speaker in this poem starts by strongly advising against the actions and as the poem continues urges a person to take different actions. In this poem, the speaker tells of how to embrace life by needing the experience of melancholy to appreciate the true joy and beauty of
...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.
Yeats, W. B. The Wild Swans at Coole. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1919; Bartleby.com, 1999.
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.
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.