W.B Yeats Introduction

Background
1. Born to a Protestant family in County Dublin, 1865.
2. Rejected Christianity and organised religion in favour of 'spirituality'.
3. An Irish nationalist. He later distanced himself from explicit politics.
4. Loved and lusted after Maud Gonne, proposed to her 4 or 5 times.
Descriptions
1. "His thought was dialectical; for every truth he found he embarced a counter truth ... equally true, which did not negate it" (Marjorie Howes)
2. "He repeatedly remade himself as a writer, public figure, even as a person. And yet his work revolved around a few central preoccupations and themes: Ireland, the occult, sexual love and the power of art to change the world (Majorie Howes)
3. "Yeats intended to open and complicate the meaning of Irishness". (Seamus Heaney)
Romanticism (prioritising high emotion instead of rationality, intuition over science and nature over urbanity).
1. Late 18th century Europe.
  1. A response to the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment.
2. Yeats' early work was highly Romantic
  1. The Stolen Child, The Cold Heaven, Wild Swans at Coole, The Cat and the Moon, Sailing to Byzantium, Leda and the Swan, Among School Children
  2. The political upheaval in Ireland ended his Romantic ideals.
3. Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats.
4. Symbolism
  1. Rivers
  2. Towers
  3. Sun
  4. Moon
  5. Stars
  6. Trees
  7. Mask
The Victorians
1. "Hated the sterilities of Victorian scientific rationalism" (George Watson)
2. Yeats opposed orthodox religious morality and narrow Utilitariam and puritan authors.
3. Opposed criticism of 'the Celt', over the 'Saxon'. Used the Celtic stereotype
4. Still accepted that he was a product of his era.
Modernism (breaking rules and traditions, accepting that forms of art, literature, religion and social convention were becoming outdated, questioning man's place in the universe, and concerned with language and how to use it).
1. Yeats hated modernism, yet features of it like free verse and vulgar colloquial language appeared in his later works.
2. September 1913, An Irish Airman Foresees his Death, The Fisherman, Easter 1916, In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Constance Markievicz, The Man and the Echoe.
Yeats' Philosophy
1. 'A Vision' (1925) outlines a system dictated by supernatural commentators.
2. Gyres
  1. Each person, country and era has opposite mingling elements which reach their zenith then subside.
  2. Historical events fluctuate, but are predetermined.

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W.B Yeats Introduction

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