Over the last half century, the words of poet William Butler Yeats have been referenced in book titles, epigraphs, movies, television, and music with surprising constancy, asserting his place in our collective cultural consciousness. This study examines how and why these appropriations function to perpetuate Yeats’s elevated canonical status, provide a means of ethnic identification and legitimization, and enable the literary emergence of those who place their names alongside his. Through discussions of Frank Norris’s McTeague, W.H. Auden’s “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, and Alice McDermott’s Charming Billy, I examine the complex relationship between each text and the career of both its author and Yeats to demonstrate how and why Yeats matters. Yeats himself may have donned many masks, but his poems have themselves become masks, offering his appropriators a means of identification. For Irish Americans in the early twentieth century, he offered humanity and hope in the face of Norris’s Anglo-American prejudice; he provided Auden with a site to explore his own anxieties about the place of the poet and the role of poetry in the Modern world; he legitimized Achebe’s African narrative while also supplying him with a template and the resources to interact and critique Western conceptions of history; and, for McDermott, his early poetry embodied the dream of an idealized Ireland that plagued many Irish Americans throughout the century. Ultimately, it becomes apparent that Yeats affords both cultural capital and a productive site for exploration to authors and critics who utilize his name and work, crafting and maintaining his reputation while simultaneously shaping their own. / Department of English

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Tracing the development of his dance imagery, this dissertation argues that Yeats's collaborations with various early modern dancers influenced his conceptions of the body, gender, and Irish nationalism. The critical tendency to read Yeats's dance emblems in light of symbolist-decadent portrayals of Salome has led to exaggerated charges of misogyny, and to neglect of these emblems' relationship to the poet's nationalism. Drawing on body criticism, dance theory, and postcolonialism, this project rereads the politics that underpin Yeats's idea of the dance, calling attention to its evolution and to the heterogeneity of its manifestations in both written texts and dramatic performances. While the dancer of Yeats's texts follow the dictates of male-authored scripts, those in actual performances of his works acquired more agency by shaping choreography. In addition to working directly with Michio Ito and Ninette de Valois, Yeats indirectly collaborated with such trailblazers of early modern dance as Loie Fuller, Isadora Duncan, Maud Allan, and Ruth St. Denis. These collaborations shed important light on the germination of early modern dance and on current trends in the performative arts. Registering anti-imperialist and anti-industrialist agendas, the early Yeats's dancing Sidhe personify a romantic nationalism that seeks to inspire resistance to the cultural machinery of British colonization. In his middle career, these collective Sidhe transmute into the solitary figure of a bird-woman-witch dancer, who, resembling the soloists of early modern dance, occupies center stage without any support from men and (to some extent) contests patriarchal assumptions. The late Yeats satirizes the imposition of sexual, racial, and religious purity on postcolonial Irish identity by means of Salome-like dances in which "fair" dancers hold the severed heads of "foul" spectators. These dances blur customary socio-political boundaries between fair and foul, classical and grotesque. Early to late, the evolution of Yeats's dancers reflects his gradual incorporation of more innovative female roles partly resembling those created by the pioneers of modern dance.

Li Mei-yee. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 101-106). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Abstract --- p.i / 摘要 --- p.iii / Acknowledgements --- p.iv / Contents --- p.vi / Introduction: Questions about Reading --- p.1 / Chapter Chapter 1 --- Waiting for Godot and the Issue of Absurdity --- p.28 / Chapter Chapter 2 --- At the Hawk's Well and the Drama of the Interior --- p.59 / Conclusion --- p.90 / Note --- p.100 / Works Cited --- p.101

Accompanying materials housed with archival copy. / This project focuses on the prosody of three major poets, William Blake, W. B. Yeats, and T. S. Eliot. It explores the relationship between each poet's poetic sound structures and his spiritual aims. The project argues that in Blake's prophetic poems The Four Zoas, Milton, and Jerusalem, in Yeats's middle and late poetry, and in Eliot's post-conversion poetry, the careful structuring of the non-semantic features of language serves to model a process through which one may arrive at the threshold of a spiritual reality. / The introductory chapter situates these poets' works within the genre of mystical writing; establishes the epistemological nature of poetic sound and its relationship to mystical expression; considers the historical and personal exigencies that influence each poet's prosodic choices; and outlines the prosodic method by which their poetry is scanned. Chapter one addresses William Blake's efforts to re-vision Milton's Christian epic Paradise Lost by means of a logaoedic prosody intended to move the reader from a rational to a spiritual perception of the self and the world. Chapter two considers the development of W.B. Yeats's contrapuntal prosody as integral to his attempt to make of himself a modern poet and to his antithetical mystical philosophy. Chapter three explores the liminal prosody of T. S. Eliot by which he creates an incantatory movement that points to a spiritual reality behind material reality. The project concludes with a consideration of the spiritual aims of Gerard Manley Hopkins and H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) and posits a revaluation of Hopkins' sprung rhythm and H.D.'s revisionary chain of sound as prosodic practices intrinsic to their spiritual aims.

Accompanying materials housed with archival copy.

Cognitive poetics, the recently developed field of literary theory which utilizes principles from cognitive science and cognitive linguistics to examine literature, is applied in this study to an exploration of the poetry of William Butler Yeats. The theoretical foundation for this approach is embodiment theory, the concept from cognitive linguistics that language is an embodied phenomenon and that meaning and meaning construction are bodily processes grounded in our sensorimotor experiences. A systematic analysis including conceptual metaphors, image schemas, cognitive mappings, mental spaces, and cognitive grammar is applied here to selected poems of Yeats to discover how these models can inform our readings of these poems. Special attention is devoted to Yeats's interest in the mind's eye, his crafting of syntax in stanzaic development, his atemporalization through grammar, and the antinomies which converge in selected symbols from his poems.

In my kennismaking met die poësie van Yeats en Roland Holst het ek onvermydelik opgemerk dat hulle sekere simbole ooreenkomstig gebruik, dat hulle dieselfde hoë, aristokratiese waardes handhaaf en gevolglik 'n afkeer het van die moderne massa-demokrasieë. Later het ek ontdek dat albei digters sterk in die Keltiese mites en sages belang gestel het en dat Roland Holst Yeats as 'n belangrike invloed eien. Dit alles, en die feit dat hulle albei enkele gegewens uit die Griekse mitologie daarby voeg in wat hulle "mites" word, het my voorgekom as goeie rede vir 'n vergelykende studie. So 'n ideë-studie het egter gedreig om iets heel anders te word as die literêre beskouing wat ek beoog het. Geleidelik het dit egter geblyk dat die mite méér moet wees dan die ideë-sisteem; en juis dit waardeur die mite meer is dan ideë-sisteem het die belangrikste regverdiging geword vir 'n vergelykende studie, en terselfdertyd, vir 'n toespitsing van die aandag op die poësie.

University of Macau / Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities / Department of English

In twentieth-century poets such as W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Robert Lowell and Allen Ginsberg, the literary apocalyptic--identifiable by its homology with the major elements of the biblical Apocalypse--undergoes progressively complex transmutations. While in the early Yeats the apocalyptic is evocative of earnest Romantic moods, in his later work it is complicated by irony, yoked to the cycles of Yeatsean history, and counteracted by exaggerated postures of defiance. In Eliot, a reductive juxtaposition of the apocalyptic and the contemporary foreshortens the traditional paradigms to a diminutive modern-day scale. In Lowell, the apocalyptic is manifested variously as a bitter inversion of American Puritan eschatology, the telescoping of the personal and the cosmic, and a catastrophe in slow-motion. The climactic point of distortion, however, is reached in Ginsberg's poetry in which apocalyptic horrors form a bizarre combination with humour and bathos. While their treatment of the eschatological is widely divergent, an element common to all four poets is their ambivalence towards the paradigms of an apocalyptic new world.