Irish Nationalism and Politics
Throughout his literary career, Yeats incorporated distinctly
Irish themes and issues into his work. He used his writing as a
tool to comment on Irish politics and the home rule movement and
to educate and inform people about Irish history and culture. Yeats
also used the backdrop of the Irish countryside to retell stories and
legends from Irish folklore. As he became increasingly involved
in nationalist politics, his poems took on a patriotic tone. Yeats
addressed Irish politics in a variety of ways: sometimes his statements
are explicit political commentary, as in “An Irish Airman Foresees
His Death,” in which he addresses the hypocrisy of the British use
of Irish soldiers in World War I. Such poems as “Easter 1916”
and “In Memory of Eva Gore Booth and Con Markiewicz” address individuals
and events connected to Irish nationalist politics, while “The Second
Coming” and “Leda and the Swan” subtly include the idea of Irish
nationalism. In these poems, a sense of cultural crisis and conflict
seeps through, even though the poems are not explicitly about Ireland.
By using images of chaos, disorder, and war, Yeats engaged in an
understated commentary on the political situations in Ireland and
abroad. Yeats’s active participation in Irish politics informed
his poetry, and he used his work to further comment on the nationalist
issues of his day.
Mysticism and the Occult
Yeats had a deep fascination with mysticism and the occult,
and his poetry is infused with a sense of the otherworldly, the
spiritual, and the unknown. His interest in the occult began with
his study of Theosophy as a young man and expanded and developed
through his participation in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn,
a mystical secret society. Mysticism figures prominently in Yeats’s
discussion of the reincarnation of the soul, as well as in his philosophical
model of the conical gyres used to explain the journey of the soul,
the passage of time, and the guiding hand of fate. Mysticism and
the occult occur again and again in Yeats’s poetry, most explicitly
in “The Second Coming” but also in poems such as “Sailing to Byzantium”
and “The Magi” (1916). The rejection of Christian
principles in favor of a more supernatural approach to spirituality creates
a unique flavor in Yeats’s poetry that impacts his discussion of
history, politics, and love.
Irish Myth and Folklore
Yeats’s participation in the Irish political system had
origins in his interest in Irish myth and folklore. Irish myth and
folklore had been suppressed by church doctrine and British control
of the school system. Yeats used his poetry as a tool for re-educating
the Irish population about their heritage and as a strategy for
developing Irish nationalism. He retold entire folktales in epic poems
and plays, such as The Wanderings of Oisin (1889)
and The Death of Cuchulain (1939),
and used fragments of stories in shorter poems, such as “The Stolen Child”
(1886), which retells a parable of fairies
luring a child away from his home, and “Cuchulain’s Fight with the
Sea” (1925), which recounts part of an epic
where the Irish folk hero Cuchulain battles his long-lost son by
at the edge of the sea. Other poems deal with subjects, images,
and themes culled from folklore. In “Who Goes with Fergus?” (1893)
Yeats imagines a meeting with the exiled wandering king of Irish
legend, while “The Song of Wandering Aengus” (1899)
captures the experiences of the lovelorn god Aengus as he searches
for the beautiful maiden seen in his dreams. Most important, Yeats
infused his poetry with a rich sense of Irish culture. Even poems
that do not deal explicitly with subjects from myth retain powerful
tinges of indigenous Irish culture. Yeats often borrowed word selection,
verse form, and patterns of imagery directly from traditional
Irish myth and folklore.
