William Butler Yeats

William Butler Yeats was born in Dublin in June of 1865. He was born into the Anglo-Irish Aristocracy, and was the son of an artist named John Butler and his wife, Susan Pollexfen Yeats (Lawall 1723). Yeats' prolific career, defined by his passion, emotion, and skillful imagery, has reserved him the place of one of the world's most renown poets and public figures. Many hail Yeats as the greatest twentieth century poet. Ireland hails him as one of her greatest nationalists, politicians, patriots, and revolutionaries.

From the beginning of his career, William Butler Yeats wove the tenets of Romanticism skillfully into the Modern era-- serving as a perfect bridge between Romanticism and Modernism. Yeats bled romantic from the very start of his works. His connection with the Irish people-- despite his life being based in the Aristocracy of Ireland-- filled his works with romantic elements that aided into the transformation of Ireland's social and political state. Though his poetic Romanticism declined slightly after the turn of the century, he still had a major romantic influence on world literature up until his death in 1939.

Yeats' transformation from Romanticism and Modernism can be observed in all of his works, though they are very clearly marked by three specific poems; "The Lake Isle at Innisfree," which was written in 1892 and reflects the Romantic heart of the poet; "The Second Coming," written in 1921, which marked the pivotal point in Yeats' career-- his "bridge" to Modernism, and; "Sailing to Byzantium" (published in 1928), which accurately depicts the transformation of Yeats from a romantic, natural poet to the mystical and philosophical poet of the twentieth century.

"The Lake Isle at Innisfree" is more than simply a Romantic, beautiful poem about the natural beauty of Ireland. It is a reflection of Yeats' love of Ireland as a poet and artist. During the Irish Revolution, Yeats reminded Ireland of her past by publishing volumes of Irish fairy and folk tales and writing about what bolstered, verified, and sustained Ireland's identity-- her past.

In order to preserve Irish culture, William Butler Yeats included various other romantic images in his poetry and play righting. These other Romantic images in Yeats' earlier works , such as "The Wild Swans at Coole", "When You Are Old", and "In Memory of Major Robert Gregory", consisted of nationalism, nature, romance, and the glorification of martyrdom. The very nature of Ireland's people and culture required a certain sense of romance-- Yeats, along with many other Irish writers, provided that infusion of romanticism and passion whilst Ireland faced its greatest trials and transformations during the British occupation of her land.

The battle for the nation of Ireland was full of corruption and brutality between the British and Irish factions. This revolution for independence of the Irish people would ultimately provide Ireland with numerous aspects of change in their nation. All the while, Yeats was facing his own transformation, reflecting exactly what can be found in nearly all of his work-- a sense of metamorphosis. His land was changing. The place he called home-- the nation he had lent his soul to was changing, metamorphosing, and transforming into something completely different from what Yeats knew.

Slowly, Yeats broke free from Ireland's culture. He switched gears to something he considered far more practical. His heart still belonged to the true heart of Ireland, the true heart of Romance, but the way in which he shifted from his romantic heart to a more analytical, philosophical way of dealing with things revealed a substantial gap in the sequence of Ireland's literary world.

"The Lake Isle of Innisfree" proclaimed beautiful, romantic sentiments about the nature of Ireland, steeped in folklore, tradition, and the heartbeat of the Irish people.

"Yet, the dream-laden world which Yeats evokes is precisely described... In fact, although Yeats does not make these explicit, already we can detect faint traces in this early poem of his later determination to universalize his personal experience by linking it with Irish folklore and myth." (Munro)

The metamorphosis of Yeats and the bridge between Romanticism and Modernism truly begins, however, with poetry written by Yeats during the 1920s, and is especially prominent in his work, "The Second Coming." Laced with mystic and religious references, "The Second Coming" has become one of the most challenging Yeats poems to interpret, as well as one of Yeats' most quoted poems.

"First published in the collection of Michael Ropbartes and the Dancer in 1921, 'The Second Coming' is a prophetic poem where the destruction of one civilization gives birth to a violent reversal of that civilization" (Discovery Collection). Proclaiming "Surely some revelation is at hand; surely the Second Coming is at hand" (Yeats. L. 8-9. 1728), "The Second Coming" displays one of its most obvious themes in the poem-- Yeats' prediction of a shift from one ideology to another-- the end of one era, and the beginning of another.

The poem portrays Yeats' prediction of a change from Christian tradition to philosophy and the reality of what Ireland had been through. Foretold of a new era-- a religionless era where knowledge, philosophy, and education were key to humankind's existence. At this time, Yeats slowly moves away from the heavy Irish loyalty displayed in earlier works, and enters a contemplative reminiscence of the country of his birth. "The Second Coming" insinuates particularly a shift from one age-old religion to a new, forthcoming faith.

This transition was absolutely essential and pivotal for Yeats-- it represented a landmark in his literary career, which changed the atmosphere of his writing completely. Because of Ireland's deep connection with the Roman Catholic Church, the ideology of a new religion coming into play severed Yeats from Ireland essentially. Yeats' disconnection and disaffection served as his own personal bridge between Romanticism and Modernism. Though it was of public knowledge before the poem, Yeats' obsession with the occult was magnified by "The Second Coming", which only presented a dichotomy between his spiritual state and the religious state of Ireland (which was thoroughly intertwined with the Roman Catholic Church). In "The Second Coming", these issues are touched on.

"The poem works at several different levels and can communicate before it is fully understood. There are several interlocking themes or concerns: the occult, neo-platonic ideas, and the relationship between Christianity and the occult..." (Pierce 276)

"The Second Coming" is the beginning for a movement within the prolific work of Yeats which incorporates occult-influenced symbolism, rather than Judeo-Christian influenced symbolism (which is found in poetry such as "The Rose Upon the Rood of Time"), and classic mythological references ("Leda and the Swan"), rather than the Irish folklore and fairy tales infused in his earliest works.

In his 1928 poem, "Sailing to Byzantium," Yeats wrote of Ireland saying, "That is no country for old men" (l.1. 1729.), recognizing that Ireland had undergone much change since the earlier days of his life, and insinuating that it held no place for the things he might have still held dear to him. The poem reflects the notion that Yeats longed to be free of his passion for Ireland. For Yeats and many other Irish writers during the Irish Revolution, it was easier to be passionless than to see the passions they held ignited in vain.

Even though Britain had released its grip on Ireland by the time of Yeats' death, the conflict between Catholicism and Protestantism in Ireland had placed an entirely new oppression on his people. This oppression brought great amounts of conflict, unrest, and even more brutality to the Irish people. The wars often seemed like they would never end. The Irish people would not be truly free from oppression or repression for another six decades.

For Yeats, Ireland was no longer the same nation he had once held such passion for. The land held too much experience for his romantic-at-heart philosophies to be pushed forward into yet another era. The Ireland which Yeats drew his last breaths was not the Ireland of his birth. Yeats retreated poetically and emotionally from the new manifestation of Irish culture, knowing that it is sometimes too hard to live through such grueling transformations as he had.

Yeats expressed in "Sailing to Byzantium" the idea that Ireland was full of the living dead. England's occupation of Ireland had drastically anglicized the nation, just as Yeats and his fellow revolutionary writers had fear it would. In his short story, "The Dead", James Joyce describes the anglicized, aristocratic Ireland of the early twentieth century, implying that by accepting England's fashions, politics, and lifestyles, Ireland had lost their own identity as a culture. The characters of the story were not Irish. They had become English. Irish authors saw no way for a nation full of aliens to recover its true heritage and identity.

Much in the same way, Yeats wrote "Sailing to Byzantium" in order to describe a retreat from those ideals and a place which is no longer suitable for Yeats' generation of Ireland's citizens. "... The strategy of the poem is, clearly, to establish the immense paradoxical vitality of the dead, more alive than the living still, but richer in movement than the endless agitation of becoming" (Kermode. 88 - 89).

Yeats' poetry served both as a bridge between the Irish manifestation of the Romantic Era and the Modern Era, and an outlet which Yeats used to flesh out his own transformation in light of the Irish Literary Revolution. His earlier works spoke of the beauty and worth of pre-revolution Ireland, while his later works described an Ireland which had changed drastically and flowed through the modern era with little grace.

While the majority of his works were written in the modern era, Yeats' heart steadily reflected romantic ideals, proclaiming the heartbeat, grit, and determination of his people. However, "By the time of his death... Yeats had rejected his Byzantine identity as the golden songbird and sought out 'the brutality of the ill breeding, the barbarism of truth" (Lawall. 1725.). Regardless of his methods, Yeats was always able to express exactly that-- the truth of Ireland's situation.