Introduction to Yeats

Exam information

• Focus on close analysis of language, imagery and verse form

• Also a requirement to explore context/ background

• In the exam, one poem is chosen and you need to compare how it relates to the other poems studied

1865 – 1939

1880s-1900 – early Yeats...the last Romantic’...Celtic Twilight ... dreams...

1900-1917 – middle years... Public figure... Abbey Theatre... Political...

1917- 1939 – later years... symbolist... marriage... Search for authenticity... Modernist...

Longing for connection with tradition and ancient belief

“the borders of our minds are ever-shifting..many minds can flow into another... revealing a single mind...”

Romantic conviction

The poet as a prophet - allied with William Blake and Percy Shelley in this sense: Blake believed the subversive imagination is the source of value and Shelley that poets were ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the world.’

Irish folklore and legend meets with colonial dilemma

Yeats desired to establish a national literature, freeing the idea of Celtic from romantic undertones, sentimentality, and irrationalism. Against the backdrop of political nationalism in Ireland, this idea of ‘making sense’ of Ireland was inherently linked to art in Yeats’ mind.

Maud Gonne – intimacy and apartness

The object of desire and focus of many of his lyric poems. Met in 1889, fell in love, proposing first of many times in 1891. Gonne’s nationalist extremism brought Yeats closer to political movement – although born in England, she attached herself to the cause with fervour.

Yeats’ concept of Ireland

The desire to restore a suppressed history; mixed relation to English and Irish heritage.

Abbey Theatre

Established in 1899 with Lady Gregory and JM Synge for the purpose of performing Irish plays, notably using Irish forms of speech and the language of the peasants.

Influence of London literary scene –

Young Ireland League helped to bring together different Irish literary societies- although caused conflict with others – some nationalist figures didn’t like Yeats’ attempts to create a heroic, mythological past.

Disillusion of later years...

Failure of Abbey Theatre leads to Yeats turning his back on the ‘the reality’ of an Irish literary scene- imagines his audience is ‘a man who doesn’t exist/ a man who is but a dream still’.

Shifting politics

Politics are difficult to categorise. Easter Rising of 1916 (armed republicans occupying the centre of Dublin) caused him to revise his beliefs. Poems respond to uncertainty and turbulence of this period in history.

Defining his poetic practice

‘We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.’ Yeats is often consciously dramatic – sense of two selves.

“It must go further still, that soul must become its own betrayer; its own deliverer, the one activity, the mirror turn lamp.”

Changing beliefs

Begins automatic writing in order to conduct conversations with spirits (from his wife, George) – writing without conscious thought – as though a spirit is holding the pen. Yeats’ later works try to make a system of history, culture and personality/self – how do they all link together? Sense of imposing order upon chaos...

1. Poetic dreams and private myths2. Love and lyric poet3. Politician and player4. Yeats the occultist5. Yeats the old man6. Yeats the commentator on poetry

Key points to absorb... ‘He had an uncanny way of standing aside and looking on at the game

of life as a spectator.’ (Katherine Tynan, poet and friend of Yeats)• Re-making himself continually: writer, poet, public figure,

revolutionary, myth maker...• Adopting personas...• Sense of a dialectic – for every truth, there is a counter-truth, but no

negation.• However, central pre-occupations remain the same: Ireland, the

occult and magic, sexual love and the power of art to work in and change the world.

• The main continuity in all Yeats’ works is arguably desire and its objects, along with a continual sense of something that can’t be satisfied...

Activity – only connect!

• In pairs, review the timeline of Yeats’ life which includes historical events and other literary happenings.

• Discuss which events seem to have been the most significant in relation to Yeats’ life, then choose three events which you feel might be the most important in terms of how they might tell us something about his poetry.