Content. Introduction. Chapter. I. Famous Irish Poet

Chapter.II. The aspects of modernism in The Wild Swans of Coole by W.B. Yeats.
2.1 William Butler’s Famous work.
Most people agree that William Butler Yeats is among the best poets of the 20th century. He belonged to the Protestant Anglo-Irish minority that had been in charge of Ireland's politics, economy, society, and culture since at least the 17th century. Although Yeats steadfastly asserted his Irish nationality, the majority of these minority regarded themselves English citizens who just so happened to have been born in Ireland. Yeats retained his cultural origins by including Irish stories and heroes in many of his poetry and plays, despite spending 14 years of his boyhood in London (and maintaining a regular residence there during the first half of his adult life). He adhered to his view of himself as an artist with the same tenacity. Many people accused him of being elitist because of this conviction, but it also undoubtedly made him brilliant. Yeats acknowledged the modern need of having to make a solitary and conscious "option of the principles and presuppositions in terms of which [made] sense of his experience," as fellow poet W.H. Auden wrote in a 1948 Kenyon Review essay titled "Yeats as an Example." Yeats received the high praise from Auden for penning "some of the most beautiful poetry" of the contemporary era. Yeats may have been the only poet who, both during and after his life, stood to poignantly embody a people and a nation. His poetry is still widely read today throughout the English-speaking globe. Yeats's poetry was published for the first time in the Dublin University Review in 1885, a significant year in his early adulthood, and he also developed a significant interest in occultism. He also met John O'Leary that year, a well-known patriot who had recently returned to Ireland after spending 20 years in prison and exile for revolutionary nationalist actions. O'Leary encouraged young writers to use Irish themes because of his intense passion for Irish literature, music, and ballads. Yeats, who had previously favoured more sentimental settings and themes, quickly heeded O'Leary's counsel and wrote a number of poems based on Irish mythology, folklore, and ballads and songs. "When I first wrote, I went here and there for my subjects as my reading led me, and preferred to all other countries Arcadia and the India of romance," William Butler Yeats wrote in a note included in the 1908 collection Collected Works in Verse and Prose of William Butler Yeats. "But eventually I convinced myself... that I should never go for the scenery of a poem to any country other than my own, and I think that I shall hold to that conviction to the end." Yeats was forced to move to London with his family towards the end of 1886 when he started to focus more of his poetry on Irish themes. There, he created Irish-themed scenes and characters for his poems, plays, novels, and short tales. He also wrote book reviews, mainly about Irish subjects. Yeats met Maud Gonne in London, a tall, gorgeous, and socially important young woman who was fervently committed to Irish independence. With Gonne's encouragement, Yeats redoubled his commitment to Irish nationalism and produced such nationalistic plays as The Countess Kathleen (1892), which he dedicated to her, and Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902), which starred her in the title role as the personification of Ireland. Despite eventually learning that she had already given birth to two children from a long affair. Gonne had a similar interest in spiritualism and occultism like Yeats. Yeats had previously been a theosophist, but in 1890 he abandoned the theosophical movement's expansive spiritual views and joined the Golden Dawn, a covert organization that engaged in ceremonial magic. Yeats participated in the Golden Dawn's direction around the turn of the century and attained the desired sixth grade of membership in 1914, the same year that his future wife, Georgiana Hyde-Lees, also joined the organization. He was a Golden Dawn member for 32 years. Although Yeats's occult aspirations were a strong influence in his private thoughts, the Golden Dawn's emphasis on the supernatural clashed with his need as a poet for interaction with the real world. As a result, in his public persona, Yeats preferred to emulate John Keats, a Romantic poet who remained relatively close to the materials of life in contrast to other Romantics like William Blake and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Yeats eschewed what he saw as Blake's obscurity, whose lyrical pictures were drawn from mystical visions rather than the concrete, everyday world. Yeats used esoteric symbolism in numerous of the poems in the 1899 collection The Wind among the Reeds, although his visionary and utopian ideas were more closely allied with those of Blake and Shelley than Keats. However, the majority of Yeats' poetry incorporated symbols from everyday life and well-known customs, and a large portion of it remained to be influenced by Irish themes in the 1890s. He also had a greater interest in poetic devices during this decade. In 1890, he and English degenerate poet Lionel Johnson collaborated to start the Rhymers' Club, a gathering place for poets in London to read and discuss their work. The Rhymers valued workmanship and subjectivity highly and favored sophisticated aestheticism over nationality. The lush density of Yeats' poetry at the time, which culminated in The Wind among the Reeds, is a reflection of the club's impact (1899). The Rhymers' conviction that a poet should strive "at rhythm and cadence, at form and style," as he reportedly told a Dublin audience in 1893, persisted in Yeats' mind despite his soon-to-be-abandoned luxuriant density. Yeats had a greater interest in theater towards the turn of the century, a development that was encouraged by his famous artist and orator father, who liked extremely dramatic passages in literature. The author relished his first visit to Lady Augusta Gregory's County Galway estate, Coole Park, in the summer of 1897. There, he came up with strategies for promoting an original Irish drama with Lady Gregory and her next-door neighbor Edward Martyn. Yeats' The Countess Kathleen was one of three annual shows they produced in Dublin in 1899. In 1902, they helped a group of amateur Irish actors perform George Russell's Irish legend "Deirdre" and Yeats' Cathleen ni Houlihan. The Irish National Theatre Society was established as a result of the success of these plays, with Yeats serving as its first president. The company's new permanent home, Dublin's Abbey Theatre, was renovated thanks to a generous patron, and the theater officially opened its doors in December. It featured pieces by the three directors of the company: Lady Gregory, John M. Synge, and Yeats, who was represented that evening with On Baile's Strand, the first of his several plays on the valiant old Irish warrior Cuchulain. Yeats was very involved in the management of the Abbey Theatre company throughout the first ten years of the 20th century. He also created 10 plays at this period, and the straightforward dialogue needed for the stage began to influence his poetry as well. He abandoned The Wind Among the Reeds' overly ornamented approach in favor of conversational rhythms and plainer language. His first three books of poetry published in the 20th century, In the Seven Woods (1903), The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910), and Responsibilities (1913), show this evolution in his literary approach (1914). These collections of poems contain a number of poems that focus on style. For instance, Yeats mocked his 1890s literary style in "A Coat," a 1912 poem, by claiming that he had once decorated his poems with a coat "covered with embroidery / Out of old myths." There's more enterprise in going naked, the poem declares at its conclusion. His contemporaneous readers were dismayed by this break from the traditional 19th-century style; they preferred the pleasant musicality of such well-known poems as "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," which he penned in 1890. Only the first of numerous significant stylistic alterations was simplification. The well-known Irish poet Seamus Heaney praised Yeats for continuously modifying and honing his poetry skill in his article "Yeats as an Example?" in Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968-1978. Heaney stated, "He is, in fact, the best example for a poet reaching middle age. He bothers you with the suggestion that if you have managed to do one kind of poem in your own way, you should cast off that way and face into another area of your experience until you have learned a new voice to say that area properly. He reminds you that revision and slog-work are what you may have to undergo if you seek the satisfaction of finish. As a playwright, Yeats eventually started experimenting; in 1916, for instance, he adopted a purposefully esoteric, nonrealistic dramatic style based on Japanese Noh plays, a theatrical genre that poet Ezra Pound had introduced him to. Yeats referred to these pieces as "plays for dancers." For the first fifteen years of the 20th century, Yeats carried out his obligations as president of the Abbey Theatre company, although his patriotic passion was less obvious. The author was left without Maud Gonne's support after she and her exiled Irish revolutionary husband John MacBride relocated to Paris. But after the Easter Rising, an unsuccessful six-day armed uprising of Irish republicans against the British in Dublin, he once more turned out for the nationalist cause in 1916. Now separated from Gonne, MacBride took part in the uprising and was later put to death. In response, Yeats wrote "Easter, 1916," an elegant portrayal of his conflicted emotions of amazement, romantic adulation, and a more sober assessment. Yeats eventually decided to live in Ireland rather than England as a result of the Easter Rising, and his 1917 marriage to Hyde-Lees further solidified that decision. He had earlier begged his forefathers' forgiveness in the first verse of Responsibilities for not having wed to carry on his Irish lineage: "Although I have grown close to forty-nine, / I have no kid, I have nothing but a book." Yeats' exploration of difficult and esoteric issues continued after he got married. He had always been intrigued by the contrast between an individual's internal and exterior selves—between the genuine self and the portions of the self that the individual chooses to exhibit. In 1910, Yeats made the first reference to the importance of masks in his short poem "The Mask," in which a lady reminds her lover that his interest in her is based on her outward appearance and not on her secret, inner nature. In a collection of essays titled Per Amica Silentia Lunae (1918), Yeats eloquently expressed the concept of the mask: "I think all happiness depends on the energy to assume the mask of some other life, on a re-birth as someone not one's self." Many of Yeats' poems contain references to this idea. Yeats persisted in studying mysticism. Four days after the wedding, his bride started a long-term experiment with automatic writing, a psychic phenomenon in which her hand and pen acted as unconsciously channeled communication tools for the spirit realm. In over 4,000 sessions of automatic writing, Yeats and his wife produced about 4,000 pages, which he meticulously and arduously studied. Yeats developed his beliefs about life and history as a result of these meetings. He thought that there were some patterns, the most significant of which were what he called "gyres," interpenetrating cones that represented mixes of opposites from both the personal and historical spheres. He argued that gyres began with the impregnation of a mortal woman by the divine, first with Zeus' rape of Leda and then with Mary's virgin birth. Yeats discovered that within each 2,000-year period, symbolic events took place in the middle of the divided 1000-year periods. He thought that during these times of equilibrium, a civilization may thrive particularly, citing as examples the magnificence of Athens in 500 B.C., Byzantium in 500 A.D., and the Italian Renaissance in 1500 A.D. Yeats also compared these cycles of history to the 28-day lunar cycle, arguing that physical existence increases steadily until it reaches its peak at the full moon, which he characterized as having perfect beauty. Physical existence gradually diminishes throughout the course of the second half of the cycle until it totally vanishes at the new moon, at which point the cycle restarts. Yeats noticed that a person completes the phases as he advances from birth to maturity and declines toward death, applying this pattern to both historical eras and to individual lives. Yeats expanded the idea by associating various phases with particular personality types, so that although if each person goes through a variety of phases over the course of a lifetime, only one provides an overall description of the person's entire life. In A Vision (1925; significantly updated in 1937), Yeats established his complex and imperfectly structured views of personality and history. Some of the symbolic patterns (gyres, moon phases) serve as significant context for many of the poems and plays he composed in the second part of his career. Ireland experienced a great deal of internal conflict throughout Yeats' teenage years. Bitter disagreements over the division of Northern Ireland and the phrasing of a formal oath of allegiance to the British Crown broke out in the fledgling Irish Free State in 1921. These problems sparked the Irish Civil War, which took place between June 1922 and May 1923. Yeats firmly supported the new Irish administration. In December 1922, when rebels were kidnapping officials and setting their homes on fire, he agreed to a six-year appointment to the Irish Free State's senate. The government even stationed armed sentries at Yeats' door when he moved permanently to Dublin in 1922 (after retaining a property in London for 30 years). Yeats saw himself as a senator who stood for order while the unstable new country limped slowly toward stability. After visiting an Irish elementary school, he was inspired to write the poem "Among School Children," which describes him as a "sixty-year-old smiling public guy." Having won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923, he was also a hugely eminent and recognized artist. Yeats wrote plays and poems throughout his time in the senate that are both specific to Ireland and universal in scope. Due to the nighttime violence, the poet might "sweat with horror" (as he put it in his poem "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen"), but he could also generalize such horrific realities by connecting them with happenings throughout history and the rest of the world. Although The Wild Swans at Coole (1917; enlarged edition, 1919), Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921), The Tower, The Winding Stair (1929); enlarged edition, 1933), and Words for Music Perhaps and Other Poems (1932) also possess considerable merit, The Tower (1928) is frequently regarded as his best single book due to the energy of the poems written in response to these unsettling times. Yeats' acute awareness of old age is another significant aspect of the poems in both these collections and subsequent volumes. Even his love poetry from the late 1890s, which were written when he was still a young man, frequently reference gray hair and exhaustion. However, Yeats' health started to deteriorate when he was over 60, and he soon found himself facing actual, as opposed to imagined, "bodily decrepitude" (a term from "After Long Silence") and impending death. The last 15 years of the author's life were characterized by incredible vitality and a zest for life, despite the fact that he was frequently acutely aware of his physical deterioration. He continued to create plays, such as The Words upon the Window Pane (1934), a lengthy work on spiritualism and the Irish writer Jonathan Swift who lived in the 18th century, as well as Sophocles' King Oedipus and Oedipus at Colonus (translations performed with masks in 1926 and 1927). A series of boisterous, energetic poems featuring a fictional elderly peasant woman named Crazy Jane were also written by him in 1929 as a way of expressing his joy after recovering from a major illness. The title of his 1938 collection New Poems represented both his persona as "The Wild Old Wicked Man" (the name of one of his poems) and his poetical renewal. Yeats grew older and became increasingly enraged by how Ireland was becoming. With Lady Gregory's passing in 1932 and the abandonment of the Coole Park estate, the Anglo-Irish Protestant minority no longer held sway over Irish society and culture, and Yeats felt cut off from the dazzling accomplishments of the 18th Anglo-Irish heritage. The greatness of Anglo-Irishmen like Jonathan Swift, philosopher George Berkeley, and statesman Edmund Burke stood in stark contrast to the undistinguished commonness of contemporary Irish society, which seemed preoccupied with the interests of merchants and peasants, in Yeats' unashamedly antidemocratic view. In recent plays such as Purgatory (1938) and the essays from On the Boiler, he expressed his unpopular beliefs (1939). But Yeats made up for his frequently arrogant behavior with the struggles he revealed in his final works. He approached death with a bravery that was inspired in part by his hazy belief in reincarnation and in part by his appreciation for the valiant valor he saw in Ireland throughout history, particularly in the 18th century. In high spirits, he could deliver the famous epitaph that closes his poem "Under Ben Bulben" and is penned just six months before his passing: "Cast a chilly eye / On life, on death. / Horseman, pass by!" However, the fear-filled cry that "distracts my thought" at the conclusion of another late poem, "The Man and the Echo," as well as the poignantly frivolous lust for life in the final lines of "Politics," the poem with which he wanted to close Last Poems, complicate the bold assurance of those lines. Yeats maintained a strong sense of independence from the changing trends in modern poetry throughout his latter years, despite having considerable connections to other poets. He was not particularly drawn to literary modernism other than probably because of its stereotype of youth and vitality. He was unconcerned that, during the last two decades of his life, his predilection for using rhyme and rigid stanza forms would set him apart from the fad of new poetry because he enjoyed a wide variety of classic English poetry and play. Yeats' adherence to poetic tradition did not, however, include T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, whose use of literary and cultural traditions he believed to be frequently obscure and unduly erudite. Yeats lamented the youthful poets' extreme admiration for Eliot's 1922 novel The Waste Land. Yeats wanted all art to be vibrant and energetic, disliking Eliot's flat rhythms and icy, gloomy atmosphere. He believed that the literary traditions that gave Eliot so many references and quotations should only be used in a poem if they have sufficiently captured the individual poet's imagination to serve as poetic ingredients of the kind Yeats referred to in "The Tower": "Poet's imaginings / And memories of love, / Memories of the words of women, / All those things whereof / Man makes a superhuman / Mirror-resembling dream."⁷