Chapter 10 William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats was born in Sandymount, Dublin. His father’s family, of English stock, had been in Ireland for at least 200 years; his mother’s,the Pollexfens, hailing originally from Devon, had been for some generations in Silgo, in the west of Ireland. Yeats did not like the aesthetic idea of “art for art’s sake”. To write about Ireland for an Irish audience and to recreate a specifically Irish literature—these were aims that Yeats was fighting for as a poet and a playwright. Yeats had a very long poetic career, from the 1880s to the 1930s. His career coincided with the development of modern history and the disintegration of social values and human beliefs which had a great impact both on techniques and subject matter of modern literature. Yeats is rather a poet of man than nature. With Yeats, poetry is life. His poems tend to present human life in the mode of drama and conflicts in place and time with the value residing in the conflict rather than in the final victory. His characteristic poems are cries, laments, prayers, legends, and rebukes; they are human sound rather than objects. When he died in January 1939, he left a body of verse that, in variety and power, made him beyond question the greatest twentieth-century poet of English.
Critical Perspectives
1.Narratology Study
Raşit Çolark, in “Paratextual Comparison of Two Poets: William Butler Yeats and Avnî”, argues that William Butler Yeats is an Irish writer, dramatist, educationist and philosopher. Sultan Mehmed Ⅱ, the Conqueror of Istanbul, is one of the greatest sultans of the Ottoman Empire. W. B. Yeats was born in Ireland on 13th of June in 1865 and he died on 28th of January in 1939 in France. Sultan Mehmed Ⅱ was born at Edirne Palace on 30th of March, in 1432 and he died on the 3rd of May in 1481 in Istanbul. Despite the fact that they originated from different societies and nations, they wrote poems about similar themes such as nation, land, freedom and love. In this study, it is expected to research Irish statesman, William Butler Yeats who won the Noble prize for literature in 1923 and Mehmed Ⅱ who conquered Istanbul in 1453 and wrote various ghazals by comparing the books Fâtih Dîvânı ve Şerhi translated in English as Diwan of Sultan Mehmed Ⅱ with Commentary and The Collected Works of William Butler Yeats Volume Ⅰ whose subtitle is The Poems through paratextuality. Paratextual approach which belongs to French literary critic Gérard Genette is going to be the main agent in assessing life, works and impressions of both extraordinary artists, Archpoet and Avnî.[1]
Nadezhda V. Petrunina, in “Esoteric Metaphors in W.B. Yeats’s Early Poetry and Its Russian Translations”, dwells on idio-style of William Butler Yeats, a renowned Anglo-Irish poet, famous for his interest in esoteric doctrines. Topics analyzed are the influence of several esoteric motifs on the stylistic device of metaphor employed by the poet and the specificity of the metaphorical contexts in the Russian translations of Yeats’s verse.[2]
2.Cultural Study
Bernard McKenna, in“Yeats, On the Boiler, the Aesthetics of Cultural Disintegration and the Program for Renewal ‘of our own rich experience’”, argues that in On the Boiler, W. B. Yeats depicts the collapse of his paradigm for Ireland’s renewal through culture and discerns the seeds for a new cultural movement rooted in education and eugenics. Through education and eugenics, Yeats foresees the rebirth of a new paradigm of cultural nationalism engendered in the “rich experience” of the Irish people and achieving an end very much akin to his earlier paradigm, with a significant addition: Yeats thought to extend his program for cultural renewal beyond the grave. He hoped to foster, through education and eugenics, a like-minded community of believers who would be able to enter into communion with the spirits of men of genius, including himself.[3]
Rob Doggett, in “Aristocratic Patronage and the Commercial Logic of Yeats’s Responsibilities”, challenges the longstanding critical assumption that the poems in W.B. Yeats’s Responsibilities (1914) offer a categorical rejection of modern consumer society. Although Yeats is clearly disdainful of middle-class culture and nostalgic for a pre-modern community unified by the arts, the poems, Rob argues, strategically exploit the logic of the modern marketplace. By looking at the poems in rhetorical terms, as cultural productions designed to convince people in the present to spend money on the proposed Hugh Lane Gallery of Modern Art, Rob suggests that Yeats exploits commercial logic in three specific ways: by associating mundane consumer exchange with hoarding, as if the true capitalist is a miser; by tapping into the modern advertising strategy of equating choice of purchases with self-worth; and by rendering the object for purchase in abstract terms, such that the “product", again in good advertising fashion, always promises something more than it can deliver.[4]
3.New Historicism
Daniel Spoth, in “The House that Time Built: Structuring History in Faulkner and Yeats”, recounts, briefly, the affinities that previous critics have drawn between William Faulkner and William Butler Yeats, and suggests their shared architectural sensibility as a new medium for assessing their individual literary consciousnesses in parallel. This sensibility finds play in the Big Houses of both of these authors’ works: Sutpen’s Hundred in Absalom, Absalom! and the ‘marvelous empty sea-shell’ of the palatial manor in Yeats’s Meditations in Time of Civil War. The anxiety surrounding these structures’ potential destruction in both of these authors’ works, Daniel argues, is less directed towards the threat of their physical annihilation than towards the dialectic model of history itself: the threat of destroying the house becomes the threat of destroying the very notion of teleology, of effacing the structural sum of history. Daniel performs separate studies of two Big Houses from which these authors drew their architectural inspiration: for Faulkner, Rowan Oak in Oxford, MS and for Yeats, Lissadell in County Sligo, Ireland. The manners in which these houses grant and restrict access to their occupants, Daniel argues, suggest ideals that are more divergent than these authors’ mutual anxieties, the mutual and manifold hybridities of their domestic spaces, might indicate.[5]
4.Postcolonial Studies(https://www.daowen.com)
Ioana Mohor-Ivan, in “Envisaging a Post-colonial Theatre: W. B. Yeats and the Cuchulain Cycle of Plays”, starts from Edward Said’s and claims that W.B. Yeats’s work should be seen as seminal in the process of Ireland’s decolonisation, despite the artist’s Ascendancy roots and Protestant sympathies, the paper focuses on the Yeatsian theatre as exemplified by the five plays which cluster around the figure of the Celtic hero Cuchulain (On Baile’s Strand, The Golden Helmet, At The Hawk’s Well, The Only Jealousy of Emer, and The Death of Cuchulain) in order to prove that the hybrid dramatic forms adopted by Yeats, which rework the Celtic myth within Greek and Japanese theatrical models, may be seen as a move away from “the regional nativism” characteristic of much of the Revival writings towards a “radically liberating” (Deane 1990: 5) vision on a “contaminated” culture, characterised by plurality and dialogism. As such, the Cuchulain cycle of plays may be read not only as a reflection of the Yeatsian decolonising project, but also as an early instance of a postcolonial drama, whose hybrid paradigm subverts and revaluates both imperialist and nationalist assumptions on essentialist notions of identity.[6]
5.Philosophical Study
David Dwan, in “Yeats, Heidegger and the Problem of Modern Subjectivism”, discusses how William Butler Yeats’s early poetic and political trajectory may be viewed as an attempt to engage with and emerge from what Martin Heidegger termed the modern metaphysics of subjectivity. Concept of tradition that Yeats challenges modern subjectivism; Heidegger’s criticism of the dominance of the spectator-model in philosophy.[7]
【注释】
[1]Çolark R. “Paratextual Comparison of Two Poets: William Butler Yeats and Avnî”. Journal of Graduate School of Social Sciences, 2019, 23(2):675-683.
[2]Petrunina N V. “Esoteric Metaphors in W.B. Yeats’ Early Poetry and Its Russian Translations”. European Researcher, 2013, 39(1-2):169-174.
[3]McKenna B. “Yeats, On the Boiler, the Aesthetics of Cultural Disintegration and the Program for Renewal ‘of our own rich experience’”. Journal of Modern Literature, 2012, 35(4):73-90.
[4]Doggett R. “Aristocratic Patronage and the Commercial Logic of Yeats’s Responsibilities”. Journal of Modern Literature, 2010:1-18.
[5]Spoth D. “The House that Time Built: Structuring History in Faulkner and Yeats”. European Journal of American Culture, 2007, 26(2):109-126.
[6]Mohor-Ivan I. “Envisaging a Post-colonial Theatre: W. B. Yeats and the Cuchulain Cycle of Plays”. Cultural Intertexts, 2016, 5:102-111.
[7]Dwan D. “Yeats, Heidegger and the Problem of Modern Subjectivism”. Paragraph, 2002, 25(1):74-91.