William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

Performer - Culture & LiteratureMarina Spiazzi, Marina Tavella,

Margaret Layton © 2013

Jonathan Swift

Performer - Culture & Literature

• 1865 born in Dublin, Ireland, into a middle-class

family belonging to the Protestant minority.

• His father was a free thinker

with an anti-clerical attitude.

• As a student, Yeats was attracted

to mystical doctrines and magic.

1. Life W.B. Yeats

Jonathan Swift

Performer - Culture & Literature

1. Life W.B. Yeats

• 1889 met Maud Gonne, an actress and a patriot

who led him into the politics of the Irish

Republican Brotherhood.

• 1890s met Lady Gregory who

supported his project of the Abbey

Theatre, a literary theatre to fight

the commercial theatre.

• 1893 published a series of essays,

The Celtic Twilight, to promote an Irish renaissance.

Maud Gonne

Jonathan Swift

Performer - Culture & Literature

1. Life W.B. Yeats

• 1922 He was a member

of the Irish Senate from

1922 to 1928.

• 1923 In December he

was the first Irish author to

be awarded the Nobel

Prize for literature.

• 1939 He died in France.W. B. Yeats and his wife Georgie in 1923.

Jonathan Swift

Performer - Culture & Literature

2. The Celtic RevivalW.B. Yeats

Britain introduced a ban on the Gaelic language in Ireland

Native Irish literature was in danger of being lost.

the creation of a new culture, based on Ireland’s past.

and hoped in an Irish cultural renaissance.

For Yeats the artist’s role was

Yeats collected Irish folklore

Jonathan Swift

Performer - Culture & Literature

2. The Celtic RevivalW.B. Yeats

At first he shared the Nationalists’ concern.

he saw it dominated by the values of the Catholic middle classes.

gradually placed his sympathies with the ‘moderate’ members of the government.

Grew disenchanted with the Nationalist movement

Changed his political attitude after the cruel treatment by the British of the 1916 Easter Rebellion

Jonathan Swift

Performer - Culture & Literature

• Faith in the beauty and eternity of art.• The relationship between the poet and the Irish

people and tradition. • Death unlike an animal, which simply dies, man

dies many times before his death.• The heroic individual loneliness characterises his

heroes because their superior qualities distinguish them from the common man.

3. Yeats’s themesW.B. Yeats

Benbulben, County Sligo, Ireland.

Jonathan Swift

Performer - Culture & Literature

• Employed antithesis, oxymoron and paradox

his imagination worked through the conflict and resolution

of opposites.

• Complete coincidence

between period and stanza

made possible

by frequent enjambement.

• Sensual and sensory language dynamic and energetic

syntax, rich in verbs of motion and action.

4. Yeats’s styleW.B. Yeats

Jonathan Swift

Performer - Culture & Literature

W.B. Yeats

Life and all of its phases

5. Yeats’s vision of history

Cycles spiralling upwards or downwards towards a fixed climax until

THE CYCLE REVERSES

Jonathan Swift

Performer - Culture & Literature

While one civilisation’s people are born, live and die;

they move towards their own annihilation.

From this civilisation’s death, another

civilisation arises.

W.B. Yeats

5. Yeats’s cyclical theory of history

The point at which one era’s struggle for death

coincides with the next era’s struggle for birth

provokes a violent turn of the gyre.

Jonathan Swift

Performer - Culture & Literature

The gyre is one of Yeats’s

favourite motifs, based on the idea

that history occurs in cycles.

‘A single gyre resembles a funnel,

which begins at a fixed point.

From this point the spiral grows

wider and wider until it reaches

its maximum growth.

At this climax, the single gyre

“begins to retrace its path in the

opposite direction.’

5. GyresW.B. Yeats

Jonathan Swift

Performer - Culture & Literature

To Yeats the symbol has a ‘visionary’ dimension, it offers ‘revelation’.

.

It has an effective role in shaping both the individual and the collective consciousness.

W.B. Yeats

6. Yeats’s symbolism

It is not only a device he uses to present his themes. It is a theme in itself, in which truths

are embodied, in all their complexity.

Jonathan Swift

Performer - Culture & Literature

‘I can not now think symbols less than the greatest of all powers, whether they are used consciously by the masters of magic, or half-unconsciously by their successors, the poet, the musician and the artist.’(W.B. Yeats, Magic, 1901)

6. Yeats’s symbolismW.B. Yeats

“And therefore I have sailed the seas and comeTo the holy city of Byzantium.”

Byzantium symbolises

Unity of Being, in which

religious, aesthetic and

practical life are one.

Jonathan Swift

Performer - Culture & Literature

‘I can not now think symbols less than the greatest of all powers, whether they are used consciously by the masters of magic, or half-unconsciously by their successors, the poet, the musician and the artist.’(W.B. Yeats, Magic, 1901)

6. Yeats’s symbolismW.B. Yeats

The swan symbolises

A violent divine forceA violent divine forceThe unchanging, flawless ideal

The Wild Swans at Coole Leda and the Swan