William Butler Yeats
Possible Lines of Approach
Yeats as late Romantic/Decadent Nineties poet
Yeats as High Modernist
Feminist readings of Yeats
Yeats as postcolonial writer
Biographical approaches
Notes on Approaching Particular Works
“The Lake Isle of Innisfree” (1892)
“The Wild Swans at Coole” (1917)
“Easter 1916” (1920)
“The Second Coming” (1920)
“A Prayer for My Daughter” (1920)
“Sailing to Byzantium” (1928)
“Leda and the Swan” (1928)
“Among School Children” (1928)
Questions for Discussion
Critical Viewpoints/Reception History
Possible Lines of Approach
Yeats as late Romantic/Decadent Nineties poet
•
Focus on the early poetry, especially “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” Yeats was a
member of the Rhymer’s Club, a literary group that met throughout the 1890s and
stressed close attention to form. He was also deeply steeped in the British Romantic
tradition, so it might be helpful, when teaching Yeats in a survey course, to refer
back to Wordsworth, Shelley, or Keats. Critical studies by Hazard Adams and
Harold Bloom would be useful here (see below), as well as Richard Ellmann’s
essay, “The Use of Decadence,” in A Long the Riverrun (1989).
Yeats as High Modernist
•
Yeats’s later work is often compared to that of T.S. Eliot or Ezra Pound. “The
Second Coming,” “Sailing to Byzantium,” and “Under Ben Bulden” contain
examples of modernist techniques and themes. “The Second Coming” and The
Waste Land make a good comparison. See Edmund Wilson’s chapter on Yeats in
Axel’s Castle (1929) for an introduction to the poet’s modernist characteristics.
Feminist readings of Yeats
•
Following the work of Marjorie Howes, look at “A Prayer for My Daughter” and
“Among School Children” for issues of sexual anxiety and fear of women’s
political power in revolutionary Ireland.
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Yeats as postcolonial writer
•
Yeats was writing during important phases in the history of Ireland, and became a
senator in the 1920s. “Easter 1916” and “Leda and the Swan” are rich with national
and political themes and imagery. Critical work by Seamus Deane, Edward Said,
and David Lloyd can provide good themes for a discussion of postcoloniality.
Biographical approaches
•
Yeats’s life overlapped two interesting periods of history: the birth of literary
modernism and the birth of the Irish nation. Consult R.F. Foster’s W.B. Yeats: A
Life (2005) for rich descriptions of both publishing and politics and how they
informed Yeats’s poetry. The poet also had a lifelong romantic obsession with the
Irish activist Maud Gonne, whose persona shows up in even the most unlikely
verses by Yeats, such as “Easter 1916” and “Among School Children.”
Notes on Approaching Particular Works
“The Lake Isle of Innisfree”
Form: The poem is a good example of Yeats’s early work. It is in abab scheme, with
three stanzas of four lines each.
Backgrounds/Approaches: The title refers to a small island in Lough Gill, in Yeats’s
ancestral home of County Sligo. The poem is evocative of the locale, with its tranquil
melancholy mood best suggested by “lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore.”
Note that the final two lines reveal that the narrator is contemplating Innisfree from the
vantage point of a city: “While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey.” One
approach, especially good for a survey course, would be to make a connection to
Wordsworth’s theory of poetry as “emotion recollected in tranquility,” as the narrator
hears the lake “in the deep heart’s core” while away from Innisfree.
There is a political edge to the poem as well: if we take the city for London, then Ireland
is being depicted as a pastoral refuge from the modernity of England. This is an important
theme in the Irish cultural nationalism of the 1890s. See Michael North’s The Political
Aesthetic of Yeats, Eliot and Pound (1992) for a discussion on the importance of place in
Yeats’s early poetry.
The poem is also part of the Decadent Nineties tradition, which stressed a strong attention
to form and a desire to depict moods instead of narratives. Although there is a sense of
movement from the city to Innisfree, the imagery of the poem is calm and still. One could
compare this poem to other works from the 1890s, especially those by Oscar Wilde or
Algernon Charles Swinburne.
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“The Wild Swans at Coole”
Form: Abcbdd rhyme scheme, with five stanzas of six lines each.
Backgrounds/Approaches: This is a transitional poem that may be seen as marking the
end of Yeats’s Romantic phase. The second and fourth, and fifth and sixth lines of each
stanza rhyme. Many of the rhymes are slant rhymes: “stones” and “swans,” “beautiful”
and “pool.”
Yeats published this as the title poem of a collection in 1917, when he was 52 years old.
At the time it was viewed as the mature work of an elder poet, but in hindsight we see
that his best work was still to come: the work of his fifties and sixties are the most
commonly anthologized.
Like “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” this poem evokes a specific place, Coole Park in
County Galway. Both poems stress the peaceful mood of water and gardens. But “The
Wild Swans at Coole” has more tension, as the narrator contemplates the swans that will
soon fly away as part of their annual cycle of migration, and uses this cycle to
contemplate his own life. A good comparison may be with Wordsworth’s “Lines
Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey,” which also uses a repeated event to
contemplate the past.
For further background, see the “In Context” section on Yeats marked “Four Years” in
the Broadview Anthology, where Yeats describes his inspiration for writing the poem.
“Easter 1916”
Backgrounds/Approaches: This poem has long enchanted readers with its memorable
lines while frustrating them with its ambiguity. It was composed after the Easter Uprising
in 1916, and any attempt to teach this poem should be made with a firm grasp of the
events of that week. A group of nationalist rebels, led by Padraic Pearse and James
Connolly, staged a small military insurrection in Dublin on Easter Day and declared an
Irish Republic. It was a Republic in name only, as most of Ireland remained uninvolved
in the uprising. The British army, distracted by the war raging on the continent,
eventually responded with a week-long bombardment of the rebel forces. The main
building held by the rebels was the central Post Office, and it has been a symbol of Irish
nationalism ever since. By the end of the week the rebels had been defeated, and the last
remaining insurgents surrendered. Much of the city was in ruins, and Dublin’s citizens
blamed the rebels for the destruction. However, after many of the rebels were executed,
and Britain threatened conscription of the Irish for the war against Germany, popular
opinion shifted towards the deceased and imprisoned rebels, and Easter became a
symbolic starting point for the Irish Republic. This led to the war for independence, and
thus Easter 1916 is seen as the first step towards Irish autonomy. For further background,
see the “In Context” section on Yeats for the Proclamation of the Irish Republic and
Pearse’s Statement.
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Yeats personally knew many of the participants in the uprising. He himself was out of the
country at the time, and the poem’s tone of belatedness reflects Yeats’s alienation from
the important events of Easter week. The poem reminds the reader that he did not take
part in the rising, and can only “write it out in verse.” The poem should be viewed as a
commemoration of the event, but one cannot ignore Yeats’s troubled attitude towards the
uprising. Although he describes the rebels as “transformed utterly” into heroes, he also
wonders, “Was it needless death after all?” The sense of belatedness also stems from the
insurgents having appropriated the role of literature: during that week they created an
imaginary nation, so all poetry can do is re-create this action.
A good comparison is with Yeats’s previous poem, “September 1913,” which is similar
in tone, title, and structure. “Easter 1916” is a palinode to “September 1913,” announcing
a change in attitude towards the Irish nationalists. In the previous poem he was
patronizing towards their efforts, especially in the famous line “Romantic Ireland’s dead
and gone / It’s with O’Leary in the grave.” “Easter 1916” shows far more respect to their
endeavor, even if the praise is somewhat qualified.
For a full exploration of the political ambiguity of this poem, see Terry Eagleton,
“History and Myth in Yeats’s ‘Easter 1916’” from The Terry Eagleton Reader (1998).
“The Second Coming”
Backgrounds/Approaches: This poem embodies Yeats’s later turn towards modernist
themes. Like The Waste Land, this poem expresses anxiety for a world that seems to have
become unstable. The opening image is of a falcon who “cannot hear the falconer”: the
bird has gone too far from his center, which “cannot hold.”
The poem is also part of Yeats’s concern with the occult. Throughout his life he dabbled
in mysticism, and wrote several works setting out his vision of the supernatural. In the
Broadview Anthology’s “In Context” section on Elizabeth Barrett Browning, see the
“Introduction” from A Vision, in which Yeats gives an account of his experience with
mysticism and how it helped shape his poetry. See also Alex Owen, The Place of
Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (2007), for an account of
occultism that includes close attention to Yeats.
“The Second Coming” suggests a mystical vision of history that sees the Second Coming
arriving soon, two thousand years after the birth of Christ: “but now I know / That twenty
centuries of stony sleep / Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle.” The poem ends
on a note of anxiety and uncertainty, wondering “what rough beast . . . Slouches towards
Bethlehem to be born?” Although the poem is shrouded in mystical visions, it was also a
response to the political turmoil of the time: the Easter Uprising, the Battle of the
Somme, and the Russian Revolution all occurred within two years.
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“A Prayer for My Daughter”
Form: Aabbcddc rhyme scheme; ten stanzas of eight lines each.
Backgrounds/Approaches: This poem may hearken back to Coleridge’s “Frost at
Midnight,” which was partly addressed to the poet’s son. Again we see a strong
connection to the Romantics.
Yeats addresses his poem to his daughter, and the poems shows some anxiety concerning
the world into which she has been brought. “The storm is howling” outside their house,
signaling a troubled state that is echoed in the apocalyptic images of “The Second
Coming.” The sea is described as possessing “murderous innocence,” further adding to
the menacing atmosphere, but the narrator then states that “If there’s no hatred in a mind”
then the harsh world cannot hurt the self. He is thus coming to a very different set of
conclusions than the narrator of “The Second Coming,” who sees only a supernatural
rebirth as having the power to save the world from crisis.
Like background for “The Second Coming,” background material can be anything related
to the political crisis occurring in Europe at the time. Note that the narrator invokes the
power and stability of the landed estate as a bulwark against the approaching chaos,
possibly signaling that the aristocratic holdings of the nobility would be what would save
humanity from anarchy.
The title provokes questions, such as is the poem truly a “prayer”? It often uses the “May
she” sentence opening to evoke a prayer, but the references are all to Greek antiquity, not
modern Christianity. Most of the poem digresses from this prayer structure.
For a feminist analysis, see Marjorie Howes’s Yeats’s Nations: Gender, Class, and
Irishness (1999).
“Sailing to Byzantium”
Form: The poem is four stanzas of ottava rima: eight lines in abababcc rhyme scheme.
Shelley wrote many poems in this format, so the poem may be under his influence, but
ottava rima in English has been around since the Renaissance.
Backgrounds/Approaches: The poem is a testament to the powers of creation and their
ability to mitigate against the inevitability of death. “An aged man is but a paltry thing …
unless / Soul clap its hands and sing.” The poem’s biographical source is Yeats’s
increasing years and failing health. Although the poem is decidedly modernist, it also
harkens back to Yeats’s decadent phase from the 1890s, as he seems to celebrate a realm
of pure art.
In A Vision Yeats wrote that “I think that in early Byzantium, maybe never before or
since in recorded history, religious, aesthetic, and practical life were one.” One approach
to this poem would be to trace the intertwining of these three aspects of life. Although the
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poem seems to celebrate a realm of pure aesthetics, there may be religious ideas in it as
well: the immortality of art may be merely a metaphor for the immortality of the soul, as
some critics have argued.
Consult David Lloyd’s Anomalous States (1993) for an analysis of how Yeats’s later
poem “Byzantium” relates to the founding of the Irish state; the same analysis can be
made of this earlier, related poem. Although “Sailing to Byzantium” is about escaping
“Into the artifice of eternity,” it is still engaged at some level with Irish politics, as Yeats
struggles to theorize both the act of literary creation and the nationwide act of creating a
unified government.
“Leda and the Swan”
Form: The rhyme scheme of this sonnet changes halfway through: the octave is
ababcdcd, then switches to abcabc for the sestet.
Backgrounds/Approaches: Consult any mythology anthology for the source of the Leda
and the Swan myth. Zeus, in the form of a swan, raped Leda, who gave birth to Helen,
who was the spark for the Trojan War. Writing a modern poem about an ancient myth
was certainly nothing new, but Yeats’s attention to disturbing detail, as in “her nape
caught in his bill,” marks this poem as unique. Feminist critics have both praised and
disparaged the poem for its graphic depiction of a mythical rape.
The change in rhyme scheme is accompanied by a change in imagery: from the rape itself
the narration jumps to images of the Trojan War, and then the death of Agamemnon
following the war that is described in Aeschylus’s Orestia cycle.
Postcolonial critics have drawn parallels between the Trojan War alluded to in the poem
and the Irish wars of the early 1920s. The poem may be a meditation on the violence
inherent in the process of founding a state.
One multimedia approach to teaching this poem would be to compare it with the
idealized Renaissance Leda paintings by Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo.
“Among School Children”
Form: Eight numbered stanzas of ottava rima: eight lines in abababcc rhyme scheme.
Background/Approaches: Yeats often used dramatic monologues, so naturally one
could compare many of his works to Robert Browning’s monologues. However, “Among
School Children” is clearly autobiographical, as he is the “sixty year old smiling public
man.” Yeats visited an Irish Montessori school in 1926 as a senator.
The poem’s focus alternates between the school children and the narrator’s memories and
ideas. As usual, Maud Gonne is the object of the poem’s attentions. Note the reference to
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Leda in line 9; this poem appeared in The Tower in the same volume as “Leda and the
Swan.”
A familiarity with Plato’s ideas is helpful to an understanding of this poem: the imagining
of he and Maud Gonne together as “the yolk and white of the one shell” is inspired by
Plato’s Symposium. Stanza VI references Plato, Aristotle, and Pythagoras. The most
important concept is Plato’s theory of forms, in which the philosopher saw the world as a
mere reflection of a more complete and true essential reality. Both Platonic ideas concern
a search for unity—the first via romantic love, the second via access to a higher plane of
existence.
Originally Yeats had ended the poem with only seven stanzas, but he decided that he did
not want to conclude on the seventh stanza’s pessimistic tone. One approach would be to
compare the poem in seven stanzas to its published version of eight.
Questions for Discussion
1.
Compare “Sailing to Byzantium” to some of Yeats’s earlier poetry. What has
changed in terms of form? In terms of theme?
2.
In what sense is Yeats both a Romantic and a modernist poet?
3.
What tone is Yeats attempting to strike in “Easter 1916”? In what way is the poem
ambiguously praising or disparaging the rebels?
4.
Analyze the female characters of “Leda and the Swan” and “A Prayer for My
Daughter.” Are they active or passive agents of history?
5.
Look at some of Yeats’s poetry written after the War for Independence in 1921. In
what sense do these poems address the founding of the Irish state?
6.
How can different readings of the final line of “Among School Children” affect the
way we read the entire poem?
7.
How do Yeats’s poems struggle with the relationship between Irish writing and
Irish politics? In what sense do the poems seem to try to impact Irish history, and in
what sense do they only chronicle or reflect that history?
Critical Viewpoints/Reception History
W.B. Yeats enjoyed critical success with his early poetry. John Todhunter, writing in The
Academy (January-June 1889), described The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems as
“a remarkable first volume” and went on to praise his poems for their “true breath of life
… with an incalculable and unexpected rhythm, following the natural ebb and flow of the
emotion.” As the 1890s proceeded, Yeats emerged as one of the decade’s foremost verse
writers. Arthur Symons, a poet and critic at the center of the literary Nineties, wrote that
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“Mr. Yeats is the only one among the younger English poets who has the whole poetical
temperament, and nothing but the poetical temperament” (Saturday Review, 6 May
1899). For the next two decades Yeats was seen as a writer of the decadent school, and
The Wild Swans at Coole (1917) was considered to be the mature and possibly last work
of a Nineties writer. An unsigned review in the Times Literary Supplement (20 March
1919) states that “Mr. Yeats is like a fiddler taking down his old dust-covered violin and
lazily playing an old tune on it” (Jeffares 213).
But Yeats continued to write, and the result is some of the most canonical verse of the
twentieth century. At first critics were puzzled, but as modernism gained ground in
literary circles, Yeats’s later works were seen as embodying the new movement. So the
same poet who was considered the living emblem of the Nineties also became the
emblem of Twenties’ modernism. John Gould Fletcher in The Criterion (September
1928) wrote that Yeats “corresponds, or will correspond, when the true literary history of
our epoch is written, to what we moderns mean by a great poet” (Jeffares 287).
One problem for critics has always been the difficulty in placing Yeats: is he a late
Romantic or High Modernist? Edmund Wilson’s Axel’s Castle was an early attempt to
place Yeats in the modernist camp. Throughout his book Wilson is referring to writers
and poets that were a part of the “Symbolist” school, what we now take to be literary
modernism. Wilson’s essay—still a good introduction to Yeats 80 years later—sees
Yeats’s poetry coming out of the tradition of Walter Pater. Yeats’s early poetry, Wilson
argues, seeks an aesthetic retreat from reality. His later works see the dangers of artistic
isolation and “are edged with a consciousness of dangers and temptations inescapably
involved in such a life” (p. 33).
Wilson’s work hints at a political disapproval of Yeats’s work, but it would be
generations later before more politicized criticism appeared. In the meantime, New
Critical approaches to Yeats flourished. The lyric poem was the New Critic’s genre of
choice, and F.R. Leavis, William Empson, and Cleanth Brooks all wrote early articles or
book chapters on Yeats. Often they downplayed Yeats’s mysticism and political interests,
a gap later filled by younger critics. Their formal approaches, however, are still valuable.
Hazard Adams’ Blake and Yeats: The Contrary Vision (1968) provides not only excellent
close readings of many Yeats poems but also a possible organizing structure for survey
courses by comparing his poems to those of Blake.
Yeats: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by John Unterecker (Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice-Hall), provides a good snapshot of where the critical debate was in 1963.
Unterecker’s introduction tells us that “a good critic … can then suggest some of the
ways in which the large framework of Yeats’s design is put together and can finally go
on, as Eliot, Tindall, and Melchiori do in the following essays, to show how that design
relates to even larger patterns of literary and social history. He can uncover, as does D.J.
Gordon, hitherto unnoticed sources for significant poems. Or, like R.P. Blackmur and
Allen Tate, he can concern himself with the roots of Yeats’s power, the source of
significance itself” (p. 4). Also included in this volume is an essay by Richard Ellmann,
an important early Yeats scholar. He wrote two full-length biographical studies of Yeats,
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The Identity of Yeats and Yeats: The Man and the Masks (2000). Ellmann’s work still
serves as a good resource for understanding Yeats’s life and how it relates to his literary
output. In discussing Yeats’s use of dramatic monologues, he writes that “In Yeats’s
verse, we shall find, a series of ideas recur, but they recur as expressions of his characters
… Without ideas at all the poet is shallow, timid, and sentimental; with ideas gripped
tightly as beliefs the poet is gullible, opinionative, and biased; but with ideas as perches
[the personae of the monologues], or habitual surroundings, or, like the elements,
symbolic encounters, he is made free” (The Identity of Yeats, p. 43). Ellmann was one of
the first to set out an extensive overview of Yeats’s systems of thought.
Another early landmark study was Yeats by Harold Bloom (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1972). In this work Bloom set out to “study the major relations of Yeats’s work to
English poetic tradition, rather than to any of the esoteric traditions that Yeats clearly
invokes” (p. vii). While some critics have argued that ignoring the “esoteric” background
and context of Yeats’s poetry ignores too much that is essential, Bloom’s insights into
Yeats’s relation to previous writers, especially the Romantics, are valuable. For instance,
he locates some key concepts for Yeats in the works of Shelley: “The antithetical solitude
of the young Shelley, with his gentleness and humanitarian character, who yet creates as
the heroes of his early poetry the isolated figures of sage, magician, violent revolutionary,
and proudly solitary noble and poet, is very clearly the ultimate origin of Yeats’s later
theories of the mask and the antithetical self” (p. 57). He goes on to argue that Yeats
would grow out of Shelley’s influence and move towards Blake: “Yeats had read Blake
with great inaccuracy and deliberately befuddled insight, so as to produce an antithetical
poetic father to take Shelley’s place” (p. 59). Bloom’s chapter on Yeats and Blake
elaborates on Hazard Adams’s work.
Paul DeMan’s poststructuralist reading of “Among School Children” sparked a small
debate on his clever reading of the poem’s last line, “How can we know the dancer from
the dance?” The lines had traditionally been read as Yeats’s belief in the unity of all
things and our inability to distinguish parts from the whole because of the perfection of
that unification. DeMan’s essay “Semiology and Rhetoric,” from Allegories of Reading
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), reads the last line “literally”: “not that sign
and referent are so exquisitely fitted to each other that all difference between them is at
times blotted out but, rather, since the two essentially different elements, sign and
meaning, are so intricately intertwined in the imagined ‘presence’ that the poem
addresses, how can we possibly make the distinctions that would shelter us from the error
of identifying what cannot be identified?” (p. 11). DeMan’s deconstructive approach
turned a poem that was read as an homage to unity into a poem that described
epistemological chaos and disjunction.
The movement towards critical theory in literary studies opened up new ways of looking
at Yeats’s works. Besides an increased attention to Yeats’s prose (not discussed here),
critical theory found fertile ground in the political, sexual, and mystical aspects of Yeats,
aspects that Bloom and the New Critics mostly disregarded.
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Yeats provided abundant material for feminist theory: his love poetry, his obsession with
Maud Gonne, and his use of female narrators. Marjorie Howes wrote an important work
entitled Yeats’s Nations: Gender, Class, and Irishness (1996). She chooses to analyze
gender without avoiding the key issues of race and class. Her reading of “A Prayer for
My Daughter” is persuasive: in the poem, “Yeats depicts the Anglo-Irish as a community
constantly in crisis by representing them as a tradition whose continuity is both
dependent on and threatened by female sexual choice” (p. 115). She continues: “The
speaker’s explicit prayer for his daughter is that she be granted the independent qualities
which will enable her to be happy despite the chaos around her. However, several aspects
of the poem emphasize that the outcome of her psycho-sexual development will
determine whether she will counter or contribute to that chaos. As a woman, the
speaker’s daughter must ultimately be relegated to embodying the feminine principle of
continuity” (p. 116).
“Anglo-Irish” is an important term in the study of Yeats’s work, and recent critical work
has paid close attention to this aspect of his poetry. Yeats was part of the Protestant upper
class in Ireland, who were situated between the predominantly Catholic peasant majority
and the British ruling powers. This precipitous standing led to confusion and anxiety but
also resulted in the Irish Renaissance, as Yeats, Lady Gregory, Oscar Wilde, George
Moore, and J.M. Synge all hailed from this small class. Studies that situate Yeats in the
Irish Renaissance, both in terms of his literary output and in his organizing role as
founder of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, include Phillip L. Marcus’s Yeats and the
Beginning of the Irish Renaissance (1987). Works that explore the Irish Renassiance in
general include Hugh Kenner’s A Colder Eye: The Modern Irish Writers (1983) and
Ulick O’Connor’s All the Olympians: A Biographical Portrait of the Irish Literary
Renaissance (1987).
An important essay by Seamus Deane in his book Celtic Revivals (1985) initiated
postcolonial analyses of Yeats’s work. Deane argued that Yeats created a dichotomy
between the aristocracy and peasantry on the one hand, and the bourgeoisie and working
class on the other. The former alliance stood for idealism and romanticism, the latter for
crass materialism and utility. Many other writers had done this previously, especially
throughout the nineteenth century, but for Yeats, as Deane states, “Ireland was the only
place in Europe in which the aristocratic and peasant element had a fair chance of
winning” (p. 39). Thus Yeats’s championing of the peasantry, and his identification with
the aristocracy, can be viewed as a colonial reaction against the economic systems being
imposed upon Ireland by British utilitarian rule. The folk aspect of Ireland that Yeats was
drawn to resisted the material interests of imperialism and served as a memory bank of an
older, more spiritual Europe that had been eradicated by industrialization.
Edward Said’s essay on Yeats that now appears in Culture and Imperialism (1993) took
up some of Deane’s ideas. He agrees with Deane’s initial analysis but believes that Deane
ignores too much of Yeats’s reactionary politics. Said argues that Yeats is an example of
“the nativist phenomenon”: essentializing aspects of the native country as an act of
rebellion against imperialism. The problem Said has with this project is that it reproduces
the imperialist notions of absolute difference: “To leave the historical world for the
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metaphysics of essences like negritude, Irishness, Islam, or Catholicism is to abandon
history for essentializations that have the power to turn human beings against each other”
(p. 228). Read in this light, Yeats’s efforts at resisting imperialism only mirror the
empire’s attempts at casting the Irish as a second-rate culture.
Said goes further and explores how Yeats works out these ideas in his poetry. Said argues
that Yeats was aware of some of these political problems, but being unable to find a
political solution to them “caused him to try to resolve it on a ‘higher,’ that is, nonpolitical level,” the level of aesthetics. Yeats’s later modernist works, especially
“Byzantium” and “Sailing to Byzantium,” are examples of Yeats trying to find an
aesthetic solution to imperial and political dilemmas.
David Lloyd’s Anomalous States is another important contribution to postcolonial studies
that draws heavily on Deane’s and Said’s works. Lloyd’s basic argument is that Yeats’s
early poetry addressed cultural nationalism, and used symbolism as a means to express
this essentialist notion of Irish identity. But the later poetry, written after the War for
Independence, was about foundations and the process of creation. Where Yeats was
earlier striving for the pure, authentic Irish moment, this later poetry sees that “[t]he
purity of the image is rather the reappropriation of grace by arrogation”; it “is realized in,
not sullied by, artificiality,” and thus is concerned, like the Irish nation, with how to
create something out of a divided and diverse group of discourses (p. 67). Writing about
“Byzantium,” Lloyd writes that: “Yeats’s writing here is far from the consolatory
tradition in recent Irish poetry which seeks to maintain symbolic continuity between
place and poetic intention” (p. 65). Instead, the mature Yeats highlighted the contingent
nature of any act of creation, be it of a poem or a government.
Michael North’s The Political Aesthetic of Yeats, Eliot and Pound (1991) is an excellent
political analysis of the three modernist poets. Like Deane, North sees Yeats as creating
allegiances and dichotomies between different classes and ideologies. But like Said, he is
more interested in the contradictions this creates than in what problems it solves. Looking
at “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” North writes that “If we remember how Yeats places
himself on an island in order to be free, it might not seem too paradoxical to suggest that
he is imprisoned by an idea of freedom. His classically liberal conception of freedom as
the absence of exterior influence can hardly be compromised with his nostalgia for a
communal past” (p. 26). Yeats thus takes both sides: he wants to be the free individual,
but also yearns for a past where people lived in harmonious communities. The poem,
unintentionally, is “modern in a more specifically political sense, in that it attempts to
reconcile individual and community, right and duty, by means that widen instead the
distance between them.” The attempt at reconciling these two urges—towards
individuality and towards community—only reveals the growing gulf between them, a
hallmark of modernist writing. North thus succeeds in showing how even the early,
Romantic poetry is part of the modernist project, possibly hinting that we do not need to
place W.B. Yeats in any specific tradition in order to understand his verse.
Recent interest in the occult and its role in the formation of modernism was begun by
Leon Surette in The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, and the
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Occult (1994). Alex Owen’s The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the
Culture of the Modern (2007) contains many references to Yeats’s role in the various
mystical movements, and how these movements informed his verse.
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the assistance of Seamus O'Malley of Hunter
College, The City University of New York, for the preparation of the draft material.
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