W.B.

Yeats
Like Thomas Hardy, W.B. Yeats is a poet whose poetry stretches across the whole
period of the late Victorian and Early Modern ages. However, Yeats's poetry undergoes more
marked changes during these years than that of Hardy. Yeats is not as restlessly experimental
as T.S. Eliot, but he is not as content as Hardy to work with traditional forms and poetic
subject matter. Yeats's first poetry was published in 1885 and he continued writing until his
death in 1939.
The practical passions of his life were poetry, Irish culture and occult literature. What
he drew from Irish folk lore and myth, and from interest in theosophy, hermetic studies, magic
and cyclic theories of history, has made some of his poetry fully comprehensible only with the
aid of annotations, but his central human concerns, the vigour of his imagery, and the
personality stamped on his style carry the reader unresisting through formidable substance.
There are three main stages to Yeats's development as a poet. The first phase, when he was
associated both with the Aesthetic movement of the 1890s and the Celtic Twilight, is
characterised by a self-conscious Romanticism. The poetry is sometimes based on Irish myth
and folklore and has a mystical, dream-like quality to it. Yeats at that time wanted his poetry
to be seen as a contribution to a rejuvenated Irish culture but he also wanted it to have a
distinctive stamp, and the structure and imagery of many of these poems have considerable
clarity and control. The second main phase of Yeats's poetic career was dominated by his
commitment to Irish nationalism, and it was Irish nationalism which first sent Yeats in search
of a consistently simpler, popular, and more accessible style. As Yeats became more and more
involved in public nationalist issues, so his poetry became more public and concerned with
the politics of the modern Irish state.
Between the First World War and 1930, the most significant volumes Yeats published
include The Wild Swans at Coole (1917), Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921), The
Tower (1928), and The Winding Stair (1929). Yeats handles themes of age and myth in poems
such as Sailing to Byzantium (from The Tower), which opens with the line: That is no country
for old men.
In the final phase of his career, Yeats reconciles elements from both his earlier periods,
fusing them into a mature lyricism. The poetry is less public and more personal. He develops
his theories of contraries and of the progression which can result from reconciling them, but
he also writes about the eternity of art, producing in the process many memorable poems
which have come to be seen as having enduring value.
The young Yeats, represented in earlier anthologies by I will arise and go now, and go to
Innisfree and by When you are old and grey and full of sleep, was a master of rhythmic
patterns and colourful, suggestive imagery.
The indulgence of such moods, the use of Irish legend, and the entanglement of the
immediately personal in the mythical by a rather staged self-projection mark Yeatss poetry
with a rich and mysterious suggestiveness. But the early reliance on appeals to vague
yearnings and unease gives little indication of the immense poetic stature Yeats was to achieve
as he developed.
The passive melancholy and swooning music to be found among the exquisitely
phrased lyrics of The Wind Among the Reeds (1899) were purged from his mature work. A
sinewy strength is evident in Responsibilities (1914) and in The Wild Swans at Coole (1919)
(Coole Park was Lady Gregorys home). Thereafter Yeats is a poet of sharp-edged complexity
with a ruthless honesty and a reverberating striking-power.
The use of astonishingly varied rhythmic and verbal patterns that are daily to hand in living
conversation is now achieved without any sense of strain and sustained without any flagging

of vitality. In the work of no other modern poet do we get the same sense of a master moving
with consummate ease through all conceivable varieties of expression.
The crisp and the casual, the formal and the informal, are equally his natural utterance.
It is the versatility of form that compels wonder at one moment; at the next it is the fervour
and frankness of reflection. Poems such as A Prayer for my Daughter (Michael Robartes
and the Dancer, 1921), A Dialogue of Self and Soul (The Winding Stair and Other Poems,
1933) and The Circus Animals Desertion (Last Poems, 1936-9) are as busy and alert as the
best Metaphysical poetry.
Like T.S. Eliot, Yeats creates a modern idiom for poetry, particularly in merging
formal and colloquial styles. He adheres, however, more strictly to traditional forms than Eliot
and is more comfortable than his contemporary with the direct expression of a personal self.
He is less ironic and less distrustful of Romanticism than Eliot. He is also less willing than
Eliot to embrace a single religious vision.