'Characteristics of Yeat’s Poetry\r'

'Yeats believed that art and politics were intrinsically conjugate and utilise his paternity to express his attitudes toward Irish politics, as well as to improve his readers nigh Irish cultural history. From an archean on age, Yeats felt a deep alliance to Ireland and his national identity, and he thought that British rule negatively impacted Irish politics and social life.His wee digest of federation of tribeslore sought to teach a literary history that had been suppressed by British rule, and his early poems were odes to the beauty and mystery of the Irish countryside. This work frequently integrated references to figments and fabricationologic grades, including Oisin and Cuchulain. As Yeats became more(prenominal) involved in Irish politicsâ€through his relationships with the Irish National Theatre, the Irish Literary Society, the Irish Republican Br former(a)hood, and Maud Gonneâ€his poems increasingly resemb guide political manifestos.Yeats wrote many poems about Ireland’s involvement in World struggle I (â€Å"An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” [1919], â€Å"A speculation in Time of War” [1921]), Irish flag-waving(a)s and political activists (â€Å"On a policy-making Prisoner” [1921], â€Å"In Memory of Eva instrument panel Booth and yard biddy Markiewicz” [1933]), and the Easter revolution (â€Å"Easter 1916” [1916]). Yeats believed that art could serve a political function: poems could both go over and chin wag on political events, as well as educate and set forth a population. The Impact of Fate and the manufacturer on HistoryYeats’s devotion to religious mysticism led to the development of a comical spiritual and philosophic system of rules that stress the role of condemn and diachronic determinism, or the belief that events have been preordained. Yeats had spurned Christianity early in his life, but his lifelong guinea pig of storyology, Theosophy, spirituali sm, philosophy, and the occult demonstrate his profound affair in the master and how it interacts with valet de chambreity. Over the flight of his life, he created a complex system of spirituality, employ the see to it of interlocking gyres (similar to spin around cones) to map out the development and reincarnation of the mortal.Yeats believed that history was determined by fate and that fate revealed its plan in moments when the human and divine interact. A tone of historicly determined inevitability permeates his poems, particularly in descriptions of situations of human and divine interaction. The divine takes on many forms in Yeats’s metrical composition, sometimes literally (â€Å"Leda and the control” [1923]), sometimes abstractly (â€Å"The Second attack” [1919]). In other poems, the divine is only gestured to (as in the guts of the divine in the Byzantine mosaics in â€Å"Sailing to Byzantium” [1926]).No matter what shape it takes, th e divine signals the role of fate in ascertain the course of history. The Transition from Romanticism to modernity Yeats started his long literary c areer as a amative poet and gradually evolved into a modernist poet. When he began publishing poem in the 1880s, his poems had a lyrical, romantic fashion, and they foc pulmonary tuberculosisd on love, longing and loss, and Irish myths. His early writing follows the conventions of romantic versify, utilizing familiar rhyme schemes, metrical patterns, and poeticalal structures. Although it is lighter than his later writings, his early poetry is still sophisticated and accomplished.Several factors contributed to his poetic evolution: his interest in mysticism and the occult led him to explore spiritually and philosophically complex subjects. Yeats’s queer romantic relationship with Maud Gonne ca apply the starry-eyed romantic idealism of his early work to run short more knowing and cynical. Additionally, his concern with Irish subjects evolved as he became more virtually connected to nationalist political causes. As a outgrowth, Yeats shifted his focus from myth and folklore to modern-day politics, often linking the two to make blotto enjoinments that reflected political agitation and turbulence in Ireland and abroad.Finally, and close to significantly, Yeats’s connection with the ever-changing face of literary culture in the early twentieth century led him to pick up some of the styles and conventions of the modernist poets. The modernists experimented with meter forms, aggressively engaged with contemporary politics, challenged poetic conventions and the literary tradition at large, and rejected the nonion that poetry should simply be lyrical and beautiful. These influences cause his poetry to become grimyer, edgier, and more concise.Although he never abandoned the verse forms that provided the sounds and rhythms of his earlier poetry, there is still a noticeable shift in style an d tone over the course of his career. Motifs Irish Nationalism and Politics Throughout his literary career, Yeats incorporated distinctly Irish themes and issues into his work. He employ his writing as a official document to comment on Irish politics and the home rule presence and to educate and inform people about Irish history and culture. Yeats also used the backdrop of the Irish countryside to retell stories and legends from Irish folklore.As he became increasingly involved in nationalist politics, his poems took on a ultranationalistic tone. Yeats addressed Irish politics in a variety of ways: sometimes his statements are explicit political definition, as in â€Å"An Irish Airman Foresees His Death,” in which he addresses the hypocrisy of the British use of Irish soldiers in World War I. Such poems as â€Å"Easter 1916” and â€Å"In Memory of Eva Gore Booth and Con Markiewicz” address individuals and events connected to Irish nationalist politics, whil e â€Å"The Second Coming” and â€Å"Leda and the Swan” subtly include the idea of Irish nationalism.In these poems, a sense of cultural crisis and involvement seeps through, even though the poems are not explicitly about Ireland. By using images of chaos, disorder, and war, Yeats engaged in an understated commentary on the political situations in Ireland and abroad. Yeats’s active participation in Irish politics informed his poetry, and he used his work to further comment on the nationalist issues of his day. Mysticism and the Occult Yeats had a deep fascination with mysticism and the occult, and his poetry is infused with a sense of the other fieldly, the spiritual, and the unknown.His interest in the occult began with his study of Theosophy as a young man and expanded and authentic through his participation in the tight Order of the Golden Dawn, a hidden secret society. Mysticism figures prominently in Yeats’s discussion of the reincarnation of the soul, as well as in his philosophical model of the conical gyres used to formulate the journey of the soul, the passage of time, and the guiding manus of fate. Mysticism and the occult occur once more and again in Yeats’s poetry, most explicitly in â€Å"The Second Coming” but also in poems such as â€Å"Sailing to Byzantium” and â€Å"The Magi” (1916).The rejection of Christian principles in favor of a more ghostlike approach to spirituality creates a queer flavor in Yeats’s poetry that impacts his discussion of history, politics, and love. Irish Myth and Folklore Yeats’s participation in the Irish political system had origins in his interest in Irish myth and folklore. Irish myth and folklore had been suppressed by church ism and British control of the school system. Yeats used his poetry as a tool for re-educating the Irish population about their hereditary pattern and as a strategy for develop Irish nationalism.He retold absolu te folktales in epical poems and plays, such as The Wanderings of Oisin (1889) and The Death of Cuchulain (1939), and used fragments of stories in shorter poems, such as â€Å"The Stolen baby bird” (1886), which retells a parable of fairies luring a small fry away from his home, and â€Å"Cuchulain’s Fight with the sea” (1925), which recounts part of an epic where the Irish folk hero Cuchulain battles his long-lost son by at the edge of the sea. Other poems deal with subjects, images, and themes culled from folklore.In â€Å"Who Goes with Fergus? ” (1893) Yeats imagines a meeting with the exiled wandering king of Irish legend, while â€Å"The Song of Wandering black Angus” (1899) captures the experiences of the lovelorn god Aengus as he searches for the beautiful maiden seen in his dreams. Most important, Yeats infused his poetry with a gamey sense of Irish culture. Even poems that do not deal explicitly with subjects from myth retain conditi onful tinges of indigenous Irish culture.Yeats often borrowed word selection, verse form, and patterns of resourcefulness directly from traditional Irish myth and folklore. Symbols The Gyre The gyre, a circular or conical shape, appears frequently in Yeats’s poems and was developed as part of the philosophical system outlined in his obtain A Vision. At first, Yeats used the phases of the lunation to articulate his belief that history was organise in terms of ages, but he later settled upon the gyre as a more useful model.He chose the image of interlocking gyresâ€visually represented as two intersecting conical helixsâ€to attributeize his philosophical belief that all things could be described in terms of cycles and patterns. The soul (or the civilization, the age, and so on) would move from the smallest point of the spiral to the largest before moving along to the other gyre. Although this is a heavy concept to stab abstractly, the image makes sense when applie d to the wax and waning of a particular historical age or the evolution of a human life from youth to matureness to old age.The symbol of the interlocking gyres reveals Yeats’s belief in fate and historical determinism as well as his spiritual attitudes toward the development of the soul, since creatures and events must evolve harmonise to the conical shape. With the image of the gyre, Yeats created a stenography reference in his poetry that stood for his entire philosophy of history and spirituality. The Swan Swans are a common symbol in poetry, often used to depict idealize nature. Yeats employs this convention in â€Å"The Wild Swans at Coole” (1919), in which the regal birds represent an unchanging, flawless ideal.In â€Å"Leda and the Swan,” Yeats rewrites the Greek myth of Zeus and Leda to comment on fate and historical inevitability: Zeus disguises himself as a chuck to rape the unsuspecting Leda. In this poem, the bird is fearfulnesssome and destruct ive, and it possesses a divine power that violates Leda and initiates the dire consequences of war and devastation depict in the final lines. Even though Yeats clearly states that the swan is the god Zeus, he also emphasizes the physicality of the swan: the beat out wings, the dark webbed feet, the long hump and beak.Through this description of its physical characteristics, the swan becomes a violent divine force. By translation a well-known poetic symbol as violent and terrifying kind of than idealized and beautiful, Yeats manipulates poetic conventions, an act of literary modernism, and adds to the power of the poem. The Great Beast Yeats employs the figure of a great barbarianâ€a horrific, violent animalâ€to embody difficult abstract concepts. The great zoology as a symbol comes from Christian iconography, in which it represents evil and darkness.In â€Å"The Second Coming,” the great beast emerges from the Spiritus Mundi, or soul of the universe, to function as the primary image of destruction in the poem. Yeats describes the onset of apocalyptic events in which the â€Å"blood-dimmed soar upwards is loosed” and the â€Å"ceremony of innocence is drowned” as the world enters a new age and go apart as a result of the widening of the historical gyres. The speaker predicts the reaching of the Second Coming, and this prediction summons a â€Å"vast image” of a frightening monster pulled from the collective consciousness of the world.Yeats modifies the well-known image of the sphinx to embody the poem’s vision of the climactic coming. By make the terrifying prospect of disruption and variety into an easily imagined horrifying monster, Yeats makes an abstract fear become tangible and real. The great beast slouches toward Bethlehem to be born, where it will evolve into a second Christ (or anti-Christ) figure for the dark new age. In this way, Yeats uses distinct, concrete mental imagery to symbolize complex i deas about the state of the modern world.\r\n'