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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2003. / Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 299-309). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

This project is the biography of a symbol: that of the holy woman motif in William Butler Yeats’s oeuvre. For most of Yeats’s writing life, beautiful women have a place of spurious privilege in his spiritual imagination because they have an intrinsic connection with the divine otherworld. In chapters on Yeats’s beauty-worship in his long fin de siecle, Olivia Shakespear’s critique of that beauty-worship in her fiction, and the role of A Vision in The Winding Stair and Other Poems, I argue that Yeats revised the holy woman motif from a limited and limiting goddess or helpmeet role in his youthful work to a full-fledged religious meaning-maker--a Creatrix--in the last decade of his career. I include a study of Olivia Shakespear’s fiction in this project because each of her seven fictional works critiques what she saw as the male tendency from which Yeats’s symbology sprang: the tendency to feign worship of a beautiful woman while simultaneously limiting her ability to be a Creatrix. However, the transformation that Yeats’s system underwent between the 1925 and 1937 versions of A Vision enabled the poet to create a model of religious identity that does not require the erasure of the self and its human desires and therefore makes space in his pantheon for the Creatrix.

Questa tesi propone una lettura cumulativa della raccolta Responsibilities: Poems and a Play di William Butler Yeats, pubblicata per la prima volta nel 1914 e successivamente inclusa in un’opera di più ampio respiro nel 1916. Questa raccolta si colloca cronotopicamente in un contesto pubblico nel quale le dinamiche sociali irlandesi, tra la fine dell’Ottocento e gli anni venti del Novecento, erano al centro di forze indipendentiste ed in un contesto privato nel quale emerge il prolungato interesse, da parte del poeta, per la costituzione di un’etica pubblica come base per la creazione dell’indipendenza irlandese. Essa diviene, pertanto, una presa di coscienza da parte dell’autore del proprio ruolo di guida, non più solo poetica ma anche sociale, che avrebbe potuto accelerare il processo di riscoperta dell’identità irlandese come requisito fondamentale per l’indipendenza. / This thesis deals with the analysis of the collection Responsibilities: Poems and a Play by William Butler Yeats, published for the first time in 1914 and lately included in a wider collection in 1916. Responsibilities was conceived in a public context where the social dynamics in Ireland were subjected to contrasting forces, and in a private context in which the poet conceived the idea that only the constitution of a public ethic could have paved the way to the creation of an independent Irish state. For this reason, this collection can be considered as the beginning of a process of awareness by W. B. Yeats of his role, not only as a poet, in a social process that could have accelerated the rediscovery of the Irish cultural identity as an essential requirement for independence.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2003. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 299-309). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

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Note: / This thesis examines the manner in which Yeats developed the dancer as a literary symbol and discusses the meanings the symbol acquired as a result of that development. There is a chapter on historical background to the dance and another on what Yeats meant by symbol. The operation of the dancer is examined in detail in the following early poems: "Who Goes with Fergus?" "The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland" and "The Host of the Air." The development is examined in some later poems, such as "Michael Robartes and the Dancer" and others to establish the nature of the change leading toward the dancer's humanisation and toward its acquiring additional meaning because of its assocaition with other symbols, for example, tree and dragon: waht yeats called The Great Procession. "Among School Children" is examined in detail as an example of the operation of the completed symbol. [...]

In this thesis I set out WB Yeats' s conception of Irish national identity as a non-essentialist, inclusive, and imaginative construct. I do so against the backdrop of Edward Said's construction of Yeats, within the field of postcolonial theory, as a poet of decolonization who stops short of imagining Ireland's full political liberation from colonial rule. I propound that, on the contrary, Yeats does imagine full liberation in proposing his Doctrine of the Mask as a method for the creation of what, I argue, is an emphatically 'postcolonial' national identity. What this identity entails is elucidated by an examination of key issues of 'nation-ness' explored by various theorists, particularly Benedict Anderson; the historical contextualization of Yeats in the Ireland of his times; and a close reading of particularly Yeats's two major 'occult' works: Per Amica Si/entia Lunae and A Vision. Overall, I make several important contributions to 'postcolonial' Yeats scholarship - a far from exhausted field of study. Firstly, I demonstrate that the incorporation of the modernist Yeats's 'occult' dimension - a dimension disparaged and dismissed by Said - into Said's construction of Yeats as a 'postcolonial' figure serves to bolster rather than undermine this construction. Secondly, I demonstrate that, while Said claims Frantz Fanon goes further than Yeats in imagining full liberation in the colonial context, there are in fact striking parallels between Fanon's narrative of liberation in particularly The Wretched a/the Earth and Yeats's 'occult' works, particularly A Vision. The comparison with Fanon, I show, underlines that Yeats does indeed imagine full liberation, especially at the level of Irish national identity. Thirdly, I demonstrate the link, heretofore unnoted by Yeats critics, between Matthew Amold' s defining of the Irish as racially inferior and Yeats's liberationist discourse in Per Amica Silentia Lunae and A Vision. I show that Yeats subversively mobilises Arnold's terms to debunk Amold and buttress a distinctly Yeatsian conception of Irish national identity. Lastly, I highlight the 'Yeatsian' complexion of the contemporary South African context, arguing that the consideration ofYeats's conception of Irish national identity may assist South Africans in forging a nonessentialist, inclusive national identity and national unity. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2008.

This thesis proposes that Yeats found in certain conventions of the Noh drama a realization and defense of his idea of unity of culture, which his Noh-like Four Plays for Dancers illustrates. Yeats' use of recurrent imagery in the dance plays expresses his belief in a unity of culture defined and evoked by an image and stems in part from the pattern of images he discovered in the Pound-Fenollosa translations of the Noh. The imagery of the poetic text reappears in symbolic visual designs or is coordinated with music and dance in the production of the plays. The importance of the spoken word above all determined the basis of the association of arts with which Yeats characterized unity of culture and shaped his adaptation and occasional misconception of the staging techniques of the Noh. A common love of vivid, allusive words joined the audience for whom the dance plays were written. When Yeats stated that they were modelled on the audience of the Noh, his perception was colored, as usual, by his own priorities and experience.

Yeats's depiction of political violence is examined through a reading of the political poetry centred on "Easter 1916," "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen," and "Meditations in Time of Civil War," each of these bearing a title emphasizing the poem's historicality, each representing one of the violent epochs in modern Ireland. By studying the dramatized narrative persona utilized by Yeats--a persona constituting the ideological and societal contexts of the poem, and effecting, through the choice of perspective, the selection of historical materials--the particular contents of Yeats's history-making are brought into focus. Yeats was both a romantic poet uneasy with the political component of verse, and an Irish nationalist for whom these events were essential ingredients of his life's work. In these poems we find the collision of Yeats's own conflicting ideals about poetry, politics, and history; a collision which produces a complex portrayal of Irish political violence.