Yeats and the Gyre
HUM 2213: British and American Literature II
Spring 2015
Dr. Perdigao
January 30, 2015
Epicness
Indeterminancy
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Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, Max Planck, Werner
Heisenberg
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Darwin:
challenge to Biblical literalism, idea of authority
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Marx:
people’s actions controlled by economic system, altered ideas about human
nature
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Freud:
psychological determinism, discovery/invention of unconscious
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Einstein:
space and time as great absolutes are relative
Indeterminancy
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Planck:
atom, wave particle theory; light has both properties, complementary and
contradictory
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Heisenberg:
indeterminacy theory
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Challenges to nature, what constitutes knowledge
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1891—first motion camera patented
1897—first subway opened
1900—US Census, 75 million people: 1950, 150 million; population doubles
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Technology growth, population expansion, transportation developments: changing
individuals’ sense of and relationship to the community, to the world
Framing Yeats
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Responses to change
Sense of loss, liberation traceable in culture, literature
High modernists—mythic poets, lamenting loss
Liberation—as counter-modernism, not mythic but Adamic (begins anew, renames)
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Style and Themes
Loss—intellectually difficult, obscure
Liberation—transparent, easy to understand
Impersonal vs. personal
Use of tradition—experiments within traditions versus ex nihilo creation—
recognition of relationship to the past vs. radical break from the past, new forms
and means of creation
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Reactions to fragmentation in twentieth century: ironic resistance (puts fragments
together to make whole) or immersed acceptance
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
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Born to Anglo-Irish family in Dublin, spent most of childhood in Ireland, moved to
London in 1874 and returned to Dublin in 1880
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Father—painter, religious skeptic but believed in the “religion of art” (Greenblatt
2019)
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Yeats, unable to believe in Christian Orthodoxy, “sought all his life to compensate
for his lost religion,” turning to mysticism: folklore, theosophy, spiritualism,
neoplatonism (Greenblatt 2019)
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Spent time between Dublin, London, and Sligo
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In London in 1890s, founded the Irish Literary Society, acquired the late-Romantic,
Pre-Raphaelite ideas of poetry; in the early stages of his career, thought of language
as dreamy, evocative, ethereal (Greenblatt 2020)
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Early style as writing about nature, Irish folklore, heroic age of Irish history, Gaelic
poetry; shift from Romanticism with Ezra Pound’s influence, stripped-down style,
modernist
Politics and poetics
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Hybridization of Irish and English traditions (Greenblatt 2020)
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1889 met actor and Irish nationalist Maud Gonne, inspiration for “No Second Troy”
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With help of Lady Gregory, Anglo-Irish writer, promoter of Irish literature,
founded Abbey Theatre 1904, work in drama
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Dichotomies—late-Romantic visionary and modern skeptic, Irish patriot and
irreverent antinationalist, man of action and esoteric dreamer (Greenblatt 2021)
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Married Georgie Hyde Lees in 1917; automatic writing—gyres, symbolic system
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Irish poet whose language is English, colonial oppressor
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Politics within poetry—return to Ireland he had left for England, returns after Easter
Rising of 1916
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“Easter, 1916”—Irish rebels taking over Dublin post office, hanging; ideas about
Irish nationalism; Yeats named senator of new Irish Free State; Yeats’ role as
senator from 1922-28, promoting arts and politics
Politics and poetics
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Rising of Irish consciousness
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Yeats’ life—language taken away by oppressors, reinstating Gaelic in schools
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Yeats’ interest in the occult; culture filled with Celtic tales about fairies
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Tension between faith and skepticism
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2000 year cycles of history, mathematical equations
Those gyres
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Yeats’ attitude toward change as modern phenomenon
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Continuity between past and present
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“Sailing to Byzantium”
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Old man dreaming of songs
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Surpassing limits of physical world
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Byzantium as “the purest embodiment of the union and subsequent transfiguration
through art of the fleshly condition and the ideal of holiness” (Rosenthal xxxix).
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Universal system of “interpenetrating opposites . . . rotating gyres forever whirling
into one another’s centers, merging, and then separating” (Rosenthal xxxix)
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Metapoem
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Yeats age 62 when writing the poem
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Wins Nobel Prize for literature in 1923
Answers
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“The Second Coming”
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Apocalyptic
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Christ’s return, Book of Revelations
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Christianity about to die, replaced by “rough beast,” horrible/natural
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Confusion at moment of cultural crisis, awareness of his confusion and loss
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As prophecy
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“Sailing to Byzantium”—Yeats’ fear of loss of sexual potency in personal terms; in
a larger sense, modernist consideration, find alternative to collapse
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If religion no longer works, and philosophy is insufficient, what can we replace it
with?
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Answer is art to become what religion once was
Forms
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Artist becomes the historian
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Idea of becoming a monument, contained
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But tension because no beauty like living in the present
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Request in “Byzantium” to be gathered in artifice of eternity, made a thing
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Poet of containment, holding fragments in tension but reveals artifice of language
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Critiques of Yeats—interest in aristocratic authority, plays with Fascist attempts at
order, application of power of few on many
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“Second Coming”—something is ending but something new is to be born from it,
critique of political systems—grim prophecy of what was to come (Greenblatt
2022)
Endings… or beginnings? That gyre thing again.