Yeats in Time: The Poet's Place in History All things can tempt me from this craft of verse: One time it was a woman's face, or worse-- The seeming needs of my fool-driven land; Now nothing but comes readier to the hand Than this accustomed toil. 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? As ?All Things can Tempt Me? continues, Yeats addresses this question of role by describing the way he perceived bards in his youth. He speaks of the poet?s song, saying, "Did not the poet sing it with such airs/ That one believed he had a sword upstairs;" (7-8). Thi... ... middle of paper ... ...ory is not a nightmare from which Yeats is trying to awake; it is the very world in which he lives. When he says that if Gonne had understood him he would have ?been content to live,? it is another way of saying that (since she can never understand him) he is not content to live. As a poet, he has undergone a kind of death, rendering him a lifeless observer of the present while becoming an active participant in the past which his poetry explores. Whether he sees this role as a dream or a nightmare, if Yeats ever awoke from history, he would cease to be a true poet and his verse would lose its true meaning. Works Cited Yeats, W.B.. Yeats's Poetry, Drama, and Prose. Ed. James Pethica. New York: Norton, 2000. Ramazani, Jahan. "The Elegiac Love Poems: A Woman Dead and Gon(n)e. " In Yeats's Poetry, Drama, and Prose. Ed. James Pethica. New York: Norton, 2002.
Keats’ poetry explores many issues and themes, accompanied by language and technique that clearly demonstrates the romantic era. His poems ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ and ‘Bright Star’ examine themes such as mortality and idealism of love. Mortality were common themes that were presented in these poems as Keats’ has used his imagination in order to touch each of the five senses. He also explores the idea that the nightingale’s song allows Keats to travel in a world of beauty. Keats draws from mythology and christianity to further develop these ideas. Keats’ wrote ‘Ode To A Nightingale’ as an immortal bird’s song that enabled him to escape reality and live only to admire the beauty of nature around him. ‘Bright Star’ also discusses the immortal as Keats shows a sense of yearning to be like a star in it’s steadfast abilities. The visual representation reveal these ideas as each image reflects Keats’ obsession with nature and how through this mindset he was able
Yeats begins with a question stating, “Why should I blame her that she filled my days/ with misery” (1-2). This line evokes the pain Yeats felt as he expresses bitter emotions caused by Gonne while he blames her for his own misery. Considering
Most poets know tragedy very well. They express themselves through their works, and convey intense emotions and scenes, whether the poems speak of happiness or depression. These poets, such as Edgar Allen Poe, usually have the most successful writing careers. Although critics proclaimed Henry Wadsworth Longfellow lacked the emotional tragedy and stress to become a successful poet and writer, he proved them wrong with many of his works, such as “The Song of Hiawatha” and “A Psalm of Life.”
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 ...
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...
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 William Butler Yeats' poem, "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death," he focuses on man's inner nature. He touches on the many jumbled thoughts that must race through one's mind at the point when they realize that their death is inevitable. In this poem, these thoughts include the airman's believed destination after leaving Earth, his feelings about his enemies and his supporters, his memories of home, his personal reasons for being in the war and, finally, his view of how he has spent his life. Through telling the airman's possible final thoughts, Yeats shows that there is a great deal more to war than the political disputes between two opposing forces and that it causes men to question everything they have ever known and believed.
Though written only two years after the first version of "The Shadowy Waters", W.B. Yeats' poem "Adam's Curse" can be seen as an example of a dramatic transformation of Yeats' poetic works: a movement away from the rich mythology of Ireland's Celtic past and towards a more accessible poesy focused on the external world. Despite this turn in focus towards the world around him, Yeats retains his interest in symbolism, and one aspect of his change in style is internalization of the symbolic scheme that underlies his poetry. Whereas more mythological works like "The Shadowy Waters" betray a spiritual syncretism not unlike that of the Golden Dawn, "Adam's Curse" and its more realistic fellows offer a view of the world in which symbolic systems are submerged, creating an undercurrent of meaning which lends depth to the outward circumstances, but which is itself not immediately accessible to the lay or academic reader. In a metaphorical sense, then, Yeats seems in these later poems to achieve a doubling of audience, an equivocation which addresses the initiate and the lay reader simultaneously.
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...
...otism is established in a seemingly simple testament to a dead soldier. What better way to honor the dead than to personify Lady Ireland through his character! The passion that Yeats subconsciously incorporates into his poem equals that of his love for Ireland. An Irish Airman Foresees His Death begins on a low and desperate note, but reaches its’ climax upon Gregory answering Ireland’s call, and ends by, essentially, posing a question to the reader. ‘As a collective people, which side of the teeter-totter do we belong?’ He leaves his hero (Gregory) hanging in the balance of an important national question. The poem may be about Yeats’ character foreseeing his death, but the fact remains: he is in the act of ‘foreseeing,’ he is not dead yet…and neither is Ireland.
Having a view of something that is different from what is traditional can often be frowned upon. During the Romantic period, the writers were swaying away from what was considered normal writing at that time. The church was a big influence on everyone during the Renaissance and if any one so much as “stepped out of line” the church made sure they were punished. Going against them was seen as going against God. A man named William Butler Yeats created a unique philosophical system woven from his own insights and the ideas of many thinkers. Yeats expressed himself using symbols which stand for something beyond itself, give rise to a number of associations, and intensifies feelings and adds complexity to meaning by concentrating these associations together. Using vivid language and rich symbols to make his argument, Yeats relies on the emotional impact of specific word choices and symbolic images to convey meaning and “convince” his readers. William Butler Yeats shows in “The Second Coming” and “Sailing to Byzantium” that the elements, gyres, and idea of a perfect place all add up to h...
death of a fellow poet, Auden may be lamenting the ultimate futility of Yeats’ life and art
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.