WILLIAM BUTLER

YEATS

( 1865 1939)
28 / 10 / 2016

EARLY YEATS
Yeatss legacy regarded as a poisonous
chalice (otrovni kale)
Were all footnotes to Yeats. (Seamus
Heaney)
wrote poetry, prose ( short stories and essays)
and plays
a senator in the Dail (Irish parliament)
1923 - the Nobel prize for Literature

EARLY YEATS
wrote throughout his whole life
constantly rewrote and revised his
poems
his opus divided into 3 periods:

early, middle and late Yeats

EARLY YEATS (the 1890s)

The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems
(1889), The Wind Among the Reeds (1899)
- the elements of the mythological, historical,
personal and spiritual
- escapist poetry
- an attempt to refashion Irish traditions and
identity

EARLY YEATS (the 1890s)

a refusal of the modern industrial world

a reaction to the imposed English Imperialism
England as mechanised and materialistic
England associated with everything he
loathed about the modern world imperialism, vulgar, godless materialism, urban
ugliness

EARLY YEATS (the 1890s)

Ireland as agrarian and spiritual
as unspoiled, beautiful place where people lived
according to age-old traditions and held on to
magical beliefs
searching for the answers to his spiritual and
political questions in folk beliefs of Irelands
western country people and in the heroic myths
of the islands ancient Gaelic past

EARLY YEATS (the 1890s)

these traditions preserved satisfying ways of life
and eternal spiritual truths forgotten in
modernized places like England and that were
threatened by the encroachment of British
culture

EARLY YEATS (the 1890s)

deeply influenced by Celtic culture

the mythic world of fairies
the stories belonging to local Irish folklore

the flight into fairyland

alternative reality
r ejecting the contemporary and material
world in favour of the other world

EARLY YEATS (the 1890s)

the reconstruction of Irish myths and
mythical figures
the prevailing tone is that of ennui (a feeling of
boredom) and melancholy
the ballad form; the rural element
associating Ireland with traditions of heroism
and beauty; contesting the demeaning
stereotypes used by the British

EARLY YEATS (the 1890s)

E.g. The Stolen Child based on the belief that
faeries sometime steal human children;
one can easily imagine Irish readers in Dublin, London,
Boston interpreting its refrain as an invitation to
abandon their anglicized, modernized selves and
come away to the seemingly more authentic forms
of Irishness associated with peasant traditions.

EARLY YEATS (the 1890s)

T he Celtic T wilight (1892) the collection of
folk-stories and essays
Irish literary revival (1890-1922) - the
revival of Gaelic language and literature
- an image of a pastoral, mythic, un-modernized
Ireland that influenced subsequent writers and
artists

EARLY YEATS (the 1890s)

interested in the occult and the spiritual
joined various fashionable occult societies
(e. g. the Theosophical society, the Order of
the Golden Dawn)
took part in seances, had esoteric knowledge
combined Eastern mysticism (Indian
philosophy), astrology, western magic, and
theosophy

EARLY YEATS(the 1890s)

created private symbolism in his poetry
symbols could instill poems with powers like
those of magical incantations, powers that bring
both poet and reader into contact with the
universal spirit
ROSE - the most powerful and personal
symbol of his poetry,
e.g. To the Rose upon the Rood of Time etc.

EARLY YEATS (the 1890s)

The Rose - an eternal power associated with
beauty, love, femininity, Ireland and Irish
nationalism
Influenced by William Blake whom he had rediscovered
(The sick Rose: O rose thou art sick. / The
invisible worm, / That flies in the night )
Influenced also by French symbolism

EARLY YEATS (the 1890s)

late romanticism
no recognizable voice at the time
adjectival structure
static, descriptive poetry
his poetry changed throughout his life
a general tendency toward fewer and
fewer adjectives

EARLY YEATS (the 1890s)

1904 - with Lady Augusta Gregory he founded
the Abbey Theatre in Dublin
wrote plays to be performed there (e.g.
Countess Cathleen, Cathleen Ni
Houlihan, etc.)

EARLY YEATS
LOVE POETRY dedicated to one person only
Maude Gonne
He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven, The
Sorrow of Love, When You are Old, No
Second Troy etc.

Maud Gonne (1866 1953)

He wishes for the Cloths of

Heaven
Had I the heaven's embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.