The poem I have chosen to analysis and do a close reading on is Easter, 1916 by William Butler Yeats. The reason behind my choosing of this poem is due to my deep love of history. I think I chose this poem to look into because I am not very good at understanding poetry but I like the fact that I can understand what the poem is based off of and in return get more out of the poem and that William Yeats connects on a personal level with a piece of history. My close reading on this poem lead to making the argument that this poem lead to a change in the form of an occasional poem to a poem more about a part of his life by taking the historical event and making it personal and provide a deeper meaning for the writer while also providing a richer …show more content…
On the one hand, the Uprising is beautiful because it 'll go down in history as a great fight for Irish freedom. On the other hand, a whole bunch of people died that he knew and interacted with on a daily basis. The phrase "terrible beauty" seems to be Yeats 's way of saying that history 's most celebrated moments are usually moments of death. As author Terry Eagleton wrote in his article “History and Myth in Yeat’s ‘Easter 1916’, “Yeats poems…combines confidently affirmative statement with candid confession of painfully unresolved ambiguities” (Eagleton 248) showing that Yeats use of the line “A terrible Beauty” to try and comprehend this tragic event that has just taken place and how he was trying to figure out how something like this had happened right in front of …show more content…
Throughout this poem, Yeats tries to grapple with how he actually feels about the unsuccessful Easter Uprising of 1916. He wrote this poem in 1921, which means he had five years to decide how he felt. But even after half a decade, he still can 't come down hard on whether the uprising was a good or bad idea publicly. Yeats does describe the men involved in both positive and negative light but tends to have more positive then negative showing that he actually supported the cause or maybe just the people involved. Yeats says one of them had "ignorant good will" (18) and a "shrill" voice (20). Still, though, no matter how he feels about the cause he believes he has to say something about these people and the legacy they left behind. At the end of the day, the speaker can 't get behind what happened in the Easter Uprising. But he can say that the fighters deserve to be remembered in a poem and that they 'll be remembered "Whenever green is worn" (78). So in the end, he never overcomes his sense that he was right to stay out of the conflict. But he 's still willing to acknowledge that the fighters didn 't die for
The Red Summer of 1919 proved that any movement wanting to challenge general American capitalism must endorse anti-racist demands as a fundamental step to the organization of the working class.
Good poetry provides meaningful commentary. One indication of a poem’s success in this is the depth of thought the reader has as a result of the poem. The poems I anthologized may take different
Poetry has a way of making us feel every range of emotion, in some cases better than other forms of entertainment. Unlike a novel, which gives a wide field of vision on any subject, poems have a more focused look mostly on the raw emotion of any one topic. Understanding poetry is an art onto itself, to be able to peel back the words and feel the emotions within them is truly its own work. Harder yet is the ability to dissect and explain these ideas to another person (in this case through an essay)and have them feel and see the poem and the topic it brings to light in the same way that you do. The poem that we will explore is powerful and thought provoking, because it brings the ugly subject of oppression to the front of your mind and forces you to engage in a conversation that you have no control over. It makes you feel hopeless and angry at the same time. In the poem Unwanted by Edward Field we are going to explore the parts of the poem but mainly we will
Poetry’s role is evaluated according to what extent it mirrors, shapes and is reshaped by historical events. In the mid-19th century, some critics viewed poetry as “an expression of the poet’s personality, a manifestation of the poet’s intuition and of the social and historical context which shaped him” ( Preminger, Warnke, Hardison 511). Analysis of the historical, social, political and cultural events at a certain time helps the reader fully grasp a given work. The historical approach is necessary in order for given allusions to be situated in their social, political and cultural background. In order to escape intentional fallacy, a poet should relate his work to universal
You must analyse at least six poems, ensuring you include at least one pre-1914 poem.
Today I’m focusing on Wilfred Owen who is also recognized as the greatest English poet of the First World War. Owen volunteered to fight on 21 October 1915. Like many young men, propaganda had gotten the best of him, but he would soon experience first handedly the true horrors of war. Owen wrote of the disillusionment he, like others, felt at the time. He wrote out of his intense personal experience as a soldier and wrote with unrivalled power about the physical, moral and psychological trauma of the First World War. Nothing could have prepared Owens for the shock of war: for life in the trenches, sickness, death.
On the surface the poem seems to be a meditation on past events and actions, a contemplative reflection about what has gone on before. Research into the poem informs us that the poem is written with a sense of irony
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.
In conclusion, I think that throughout this poem Wilfred Owen has created a mood of anger and injustice. He has done this effectively by using poetic techniques such a imagery, metaphors, similes, alliterations and rhyme. To make the reader feel the same he shocks them with the true horror of the war and involves them in the poem by using words such as 'you'. Owen's true anger and bitterness comes clear at the end with the ironic statement at the end:
The Easter Uprising of 1916 was an event that happened at the tail end of a long list of events that would forever change Ireland. The Uprising or Rising, as some call it, took place mostly in Dublin but was felt throughout Ireland. The point was to gain independence from Great Britain who had ruled Ireland for the past couple hundred years. At the turn of the 19th century England believed that Ireland had too much independence and made the Act of Union. “The result was the Act of Union of 1801: the Irish parliament voted itself out of existence and England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales were formally politically unified for the first time” (Hegarty 2). Around the time of the First World War, Ireland began the fight for the Home Rule to be enacted. But this kind of rule was quickly overturned with the start of the Easter Rising in 1916; two years after World War I broke out in Europe. The pull of the Home Rule Act led to the formation of the Citizen Army which was a major cause of the Easter Rising. James Connolly used the Citizen Army to protect his newspaper “The Workers’ Republic” to call for an armed revolt (Green 5). The Easter Uprising left 440 British and 75 Irish troops dead in the end. To shows the disapproval of the Rising Britain publicly executed fifteen leaders of the Uprising and 60 others via firing squad. Many more other were sentenced to long prison terms.
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.
Frank O’Hara’s The Day Lady Died is an unorthodox elegy to the great Billie Holiday, one that explores a more distant but no less human form of mourning a notable figure from afar when one feels personally invested in them. The Day Lady Died makes good use of a captivatingly talkative first person narrator with a penchant for mentioning seemingly insignificant details that end up being paramount to the poem’s narrative. Its run-on form lends to the nature of the poem being an internal stream of consciousness that aids in capturing those small details and utilizing them to paint a bigger picture of day that will live on both in poetry and in history as The Day Lady Died.
Although, this poem can be seen as a poem showing impartialness rather than overall being dark and grim. This poem is a great example of Modernism being displayed by William Butler Yeats, because of its speakers unusual thought process. Also, even though William Butler Yeats had a great impact on Modernism, especially during his time, he still wrote in the Victorian style. Therefore, William Butler Yeats was a great poet, who greatly influenced the style of writing during his time, and the Modernistic style of writing after him.
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...