W. B. Yeats as a Modern Poet || Bridging Romanticism and Modernism
Life of W.B. Yeats and Symbolic Search
William Butler Yeats composed his huge work between the ages of 50 and 75. His poetic career, which began in the 1880s and ended in the late 1930s, coincides with this rupture in faith that profoundly affected both the technique and the subject matter of literature. The phases of his poetic activity represent successive attempts to compensate for this rupture by constructing for himself symbols of experience through which he could give meaning to his symbols, pattern his thinking, and harmonize his interpretation of experience. He certainly shared his problem with his generation. But he was more conscious and deliberate in his attempt to solve it than his contemporaries. In his early years, his problem was to find an alternative to a religious tradition that could no longer be sustained. In search of a compensatory tradition, he turned first to Romantic literature and then to a kind of mysticism, to folklore, to Theosophy, to Spiritualism, to Neoplatonism, and finally to his own symbolic system based on various sources. His part in the Symbolist movement (initiated in France by Mallarmé) is well known. His symbolism is not derived from this movement, but he had much in common with its writers.
Yeats and Eliot in different order
Yeats sought order, a new way of experiencing order. T. S. Eliot was also in inspection of order, but while Eliot was capable of finding it in orthodox Christianity, the opportunity of belief in orthodox Christianity had been blown away for Yeats by Victorian science. Yeats requested them because he needed them as a poet to support him to attain sufficient poetic articulation. His aim was to find a symbolic system that would be at once a source of literary symbolism and a source of imagination derived from the symbolism of Irish literature. His search for a symbolic system was intricately intertwined with his desire to use traditional Irish material—literary, historical, mythological, and popular—and to somehow incorporate Ireland into the system.
Glimpses of irish tradition in Yeats' Work
Although the beauty of Yeats's early poetry is full of imagery, this tendency was completely reversed in his search for simplicity of style at the risk of obscuring the message. "Obligations" (1914) is perhaps the collection that bridges the two phases, drawing on national themes as well. Then there is the enduring work in the later volumes of "The Wild Swans at Coole" (1919). As mysticism deepened and symbolism became more personal, some of the spontaneity of emotion may have faded, yet his output in the 1930s stamped him as a creative genius, ready to absorb new ideas and explore spiritual worlds, combining Theosophy, Platonism, and hermeneutics if he could. Yeats was, in some ways, an independent, self-sufficient explorer who, in his full maturity, was completely unconcerned with current fashions and social beliefs. But he also exemplified in some ways the problems and evolution of modern poetry. In the late 1880s, Morris, Wilde, Lionel Jonson, Downson, Arthur Symons, and others, joined by Peter and the Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic, a kind of Irish Morris, wove soft threads of poetic beauty into Celtic legend. But the richest fruit of his second development was in some part in "The Tower," "The Winding Stair," and "The Last Poems." Here he moved from the rank and file to the head of the procession to become perhaps the greatest of modern poets and to exert a powerful influence on all the younger writers who could absorb him.
Difference in His Poetry and Major Works
Yeats's symbolism must be understood not as a borrowing from Mallarmé but as the only way in which he could express himself. "I have no speech but the symbol he wrote. His symbols are a contraction of his theme that all struggle is futile except the struggle with futility, his recognition of the problem of the empty cornucopia, devoid of crowds, each symbol a kind of rotating disk, like Yeats's wheel or the moon with their dark and light phases; we can arrange the name of a concept with the name of a concept. The Black Tower is a symbol of intellectual desire in the first; the second also has two sides to the image of a tree, not just two trees, but when it emerges as a manifestation of unity among schoolchildren, and then it is used as an old tree. The dance, too, is used as a symbol for the meaning of aimless, aimless destruction in one poem and of composed perfection in the other (the former poem is Hundred and Nineteen, and the latter is Among Schoolchildren).
Understanding Yeats' Symbols With Muliple Meanings
Not only are symbols of a dual nature in different poems; they usually are. The implications shift as if they are slowly rotating. The ancestral homes described in the meditation during the Civil War only encapsulate the glory to remind us of its transience. Moreover, the intellectual or thematic content of each poem balances the two meanings against each other. In The Second Coming, for example, he adopts the title from Christianity but depicts the new God as a destructive force rather than a benign one, a monster rather than a lamb. In the cold paradise, a terrifying afterlife, where injustice prevails, confronts the naked soul in search of paradise. Also, in The Second Coming, as in Leda and the Swan, Yeats is obsessed with combining the divine world with the animal, with portrayal the world of time as centaur-like, beautiful and monstrous, aspiring and corrupt.
Building a Mystical System Against Science
Yeats rebelled against the gray truth of scientific rationalism. What he desired was the unity provided by a unified culture. He built his own framework of dogmatic thought from the scattered fragments of mysticism and the occult sciences. We may doubt, of course, if such a strange and vast construction of the Platonic period of cultural and individual life (found in A Vision) could produce significant poetry. Yet the contents of A Vision offer a necessary understanding and enrichment of the poet's symbols of Babylon, Byzantium, the moon, the Second Coming, etc.
Yeats' Conflicts in His Poetry
Yeats's greatest poems concern the most central of all tensions, the claims of body and soul, temporal and eternal, many and one. The pagan poet, averse to abstractions and restrictions, feels the pride of life, the rapture and pain of natural man. Yet his soul would escape from the “wrath and swamp of human veins” to the starlit dome (Byzantium) of slavery to “a dying beast” in “the art of eternity (The Voyage to Byzantium).” And both passions were sharpened by a sense of the coming age, a fear of “withering in truth” (the coming of wisdom in time). At times, as in Sailing to Byzantium, Yeats could move with slight calm from the flow of life to the best of lasting art. At other times, the poet who could “mock Plotinus’s thought” and “weep into Plato’s teeth” (in The Tower) was able to identify with many and to rejoice, as in schoolchildren, in contemplating man as a part of nature. Or in this powerful sonnet, Leda and the Swan, animal, human, and supernatural in a mythical, real, and prophetic movement. used in, which is a pagan parallel to the declaration.
Yeats as a great poet
These are the characteristics that make Yeats a fundamental poet: his assertive use of myth and legend, his unique symbolism, his uniqueness of thought, his interrelation of life and art (despite the accusation of escapism), his lyrical and melodic treatment of even the absurd and philosophical subjects, and his depth. He exercised great influence in the field of poetry. Having his own view of man and the world, he spoke with particular authority. In addition to the symbolic treatment of his subjects, his influence has been due to other reasons, such as his strong reaction to contemporary civilization, the subjectivity of his poetry, the originality of his love poems (including those that are like "Mood Gone No Second Troy," "When You Are Old," etc.), and the strong affirmation of sexuality that is treated with great tenderness and gentleness. Like humor, which combines thrill, heroism, cunning, and sadness.
Yeats vs. Eliot: Different Views on Perfection
Finally, a critic's comparison between W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot should be very illuminating in this context. In modern poetry, this critic says, Yeats and Eliot stand at opposite poles. While both see life as incomplete. Eliot believes in spiritual perfection; Yeats stands with Michelangelo for "the unadulterated perfection of humanity in which sense and spirit are fully and harmoniously exploited, and the body is not injured to please the soul." " Yeats adheres strongly to the view that he displays sexuality in heaven so that it presents heaven with such strength and avoids you from showing up with such power. The richness that Eliot's religion, despite its honesty and loftiness, pales and is sterile in comparison; Yeats was a many-sided man who, despite his many questions and inner turmoil, earned the right to speak with many voices and to know the incomplete things of life.