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Yeats's Poetry William Butler Yeats
Analysis
Yeats is the greatest poet in the history of Ireland and probably the
greatest poet to write in English during the twentieth century; his
themes, images, symbols, metaphors, and poetic sensibilities
encompass the breadth of his personal experience, as well as his nation's
experience during one of its most troubled times. Yeats's great poetic
project was to reify his own life--his thoughts, feelings, speculations,
conclusions, dreams--into poetry: to render all of himself into art, but
not in a merely confessional or autobiographical manner; he was not
interested in the common-place. (The poet, Yeats famously remarked, is not
the man who sits down to breakfast in the morning.) His elaborate
iconography takes elements from Irish mythology, Greek mythology,
nineteenth-century occultism (which Yeats dabbled in with Madame
Blavatsky and the Society of the Golden Dawn), English literature,
Byzantine art, European politics, and Christian imagery, all wound
together and informed with his own experience and interpretive
understanding.
His thematic focus could be sweepingly grand: in the 1920s and '30s he
even concocted a mystical theory of the universe, which explained history,
imagination, and mythology in light of an occult set of symbols, and which
he laid out in his book A Vision (usually considered important
today only for the light it sheds on some of his poems). However, in his
greatest poems, he mitigates this grandiosity with a focus on his own deep
feeling. Yeats's own experience is never far from his poems, even when
they seem obscurely imagistic or theoretically abstract, and the veil of
obscurity and abstraction is often lifted once one gains an understanding
of how the poet's lived experiences relate to the poem in question.
No poet of the twentieth century more persuasively imposed his personal
experience onto history by way of his art; and no poet more successfully
plumbed the truths contained within his "deep heart's core," even when
they threatened to render his poetry clichéd or ridiculous. His integrity
and passionate commitment to work according to his own vision protect his
poems from all such accusations. To contemporary readers, Yeats can seem
baffling; he was opposed to the age of science, progress, democracy, and
modernization, and his occultist and mythological answers to those
problems can seem horribly anachronistic for a poet who died barely sixty
years ago. But Yeats's goal is always to arrive at personal truth; and in
that sense, despite his profound individuality, he remains one of the most
universal writers ever to have lived.
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