In June 1917 W.B. Yeats wrote to his father : Much of your thought resembles mine . . but mine is part of a religious system more or less logically worked out, a system which will I hope interest you as a form of poetry. I find the setting it all in order has helped my verse, has given me a new framework and new patterns. (Wade 1954, 627) The new framework and new patterns that he claimed to have found in his system generated a new, and for Yeats, radically different sort of poetry. Before 1919 (The Wild Swans at Coole), the poetry had as its subject various traditional themes: the pity of love; the romance and heroism of Irish mythology; the threat of age, change and death. The poetry up to this point is, formally speaking, highly skillful, but locked into its own admissions of failure to touch or incorporate reality in any but a romantically defeatist way. However, the order which Yeats refers to in his letter, and the system he generated as a propaedeutic to this new order, once assimilated into the habit and texture of the poetry, generated new topics of its own which made those of the earlier work seem subjective, self- indulgent and intellectually uninformed. Yeats's poetry now changed drastically in focus and form, from subjective to objective poetry. Whereas the earlier poetry had opposed reality with romantic heroism or selfdestructive despondency, the poetry subsequent to his change of practice, incorporates a new vision of reality as the intrinsic architechtonics of poetry itself. Now the measure of human and aesthetic completion is no longer an inexplicable and inscrutable sadness, but an intelligent and informed detachment, an energy of mind that Yeats called "gaiety". My thesis explores this energy of mind and what it meant for Yeats and his poetry. My contention is that the idea of gaiety provides a way for Yeats to grant meaning to his life, a way for him to create himself. As the poetry is completed thanks to the new system, so is the poet. In order to see this, it is necessary to read the poems as a series of collections, or stories, that resonate back and forth with meaning and qualification and understanding. Yeats's system is his myth, and he writes his poetry in terms of and informed by that myth, shaping and re-shaping the experience of the created and fictional self until it has meaning in a way that the real self does not. The thesis explores this process of creation firstly in theoretical terms, using Lotman's ideas of Story and Myth, and looking at Yeats's intellectual and poetic inheritance. It goes on to examine some of the great poems in an attempt to define gaiety, and how Yeats achieves it in the poetry, and then to look at the early, pre-system poems to see how they differ. Finally, it takes the last of Yeats's lyric collections, Last Poems, and shows how gaiety works in the most mature poetry when the poems are read as narrative events within a story.

While it may seem that "The Cap and Bells" finds its primary source in Yeats's love for Maud Gonne, the poem is also symbolic of his search for truth in occultism. In the 1880s and 90s Yeats coupled his reading of Shelley with a formal study of magic in the Golden Dawn, and the poem is a blend of Shelleyan and occult influences. The essay explores the Shelleyan/occult motif of death and rebirth through examining the poem's relation to the rituals, teachings, and symbols of the Golden Dawn. The essay examines the poem's relation to the Cabalistic Tree of Life, the Hanged Man of the Tarot, two Golden Dawn diagrams on the Garden of Eden, and the concept of Kundalini.

No description available.

No description available.

Previous critics have paid insufficient attention to the political implications of Yeats's life-long preoccupation with a wide range of Western and Eastern religious traditions. Though he always preserved some skepticism about mysticism's ability to reshape the material world, the early Yeats valued the mystical idea of oneness in part because he hoped (mistakenly, as it turned out) that such oneness would bring Catholic and Protestant Ireland together in a way that might make the goals of Irish nationalism easier to accomplish. Yeats's celebration of mystical oneness does not reflect a pseudo-fascistic commitment to a static, oppressive unity. Like most mystics—and most modernists—Yeats conceived of both religious and political oneness not as a final end but rather as an ongoing process, a "way of happening" (as Auden put it).

As a young man of twenty-one in 1886, William Butler Yeats announced his ambition to unify Ireland through heroic poetry. But this prophetic urge lacked structure. Yeats had only some callow notions about needing self-possession and appropriate control of his imagery. As a result, his search for essential knowledge and experience soon led him into occult and symbolist vagueness. Yeats' mind grew flaccid, and his art languished in preciosity for over a decade. Lotos-eating had replaced prophetic fervor. However, early in the new century, as Yeats neared middle age and permanent mediocrity, he recovered his early zeal and finally found the means to give it artistic shape. Through daily theatre work he had discovered tragedy. And through personal trials he had developed a tragic sense. Hence, an entire tragic perspective was born, one that would dominate Yeats' mind and art the rest of his life. Locating the contours of Yeats' shift in-viewpoint, then, provides the key to understanding the man and his mature work. The present study does just that, tracing the origin, development, and elaboration of Yeats' tragic perspective, from its theoretical underpinnings to its poetic triumphs. Above all, this study supplies the basic context of Yeats* careers why he took the path he did, and how he wove all that he found along the way into a remarkable fabric.

One of the most important elements in Yeats' thought is his view of the tragic basis of art. This conception, which can best be called a tragic aesthetic, was developed shortly after 1900 in three prose works--certain fragments of the Samhain publication (1904), "Poetry and Tradition" (1907), and "The Tragic Theatre" (1910). The tragic view developed in these essays became the conceptual basis behind much of Yeats' poetry and therefore played a central role in the direction of his career. This thesis traces the lineaments of Yeats' tragic aesthetic in these early essays, determining its outline in the dreamy, often vague language in which it is expressed, and shows its impact on his poetry from 1904 to the end of his career in 1939.

Remembering the Forgotten Beauty of Yeatsian Mythology: Personae and the Problem of Unity in The Wind Among the Reeds

No description available.

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