From Irishness to Universalism: An Antithetical Study of W.B. Yeats’s Poetry

Document Type : Original Research Article

Author

Shahid Chamran University of Ahvaz

Abstract

Antithesis is an inseparable part of Yeats’s poetry. In this study, antithesis is also related to the poet’s social life. It gains its true significance when the reader affirms Blake’s genuineness in saying that there is no progress without opposition. The use of antithesis dominates almost every individual structure of Yeats’s poetry. Yeats’s attempt to represent the complex, intense situation where each theme is examined against its contrary culminates in the multiplicity and maturity of his poems. The presence of antithesis is traced in Yeats’s poetry in terms of the poet’s movement from Irishness to universalism. Among the three stages of Yeats’s development, Early Period, Middle Period and Mature period, the movement happens mostly in the Middle Period. In this second period the poet’s unique nationalism is examined while, at the same time, his inclination towards universalism is shown through three poems. The significant finding is that Yeats’s poetry is seen as a dialectic journey rooted in Irish soil and aspiring towards the cosmopolitan through artistic symbols.

Keywords

References

Arkins, Brian. 2010. The Thought of W.B. Yeats. Peter Lang.
Arrington, Lauren and Campbell, Matthew, eds. 2023. The Oxford Handbook of W.B. Yeats. Oxford University Press.
Bartlett, Donald R. 1972. William Butler Yeats as a Literary Critic. PhD diss., Penn State University.
Bloom, Harold. 1970. Yeats. Oxford University Press.
Bowra, Cecil Maurice. The Heritage of Symbolism. Macmillan, 1943.
Cowell, Raymond, ed. 1971. Critics on Yeats. George Allen Ltd.
Daiches, David. 1940. “W.B. Yeats”. In Poetry and the Modern World: A Study of Poetry in England between 1900 and 1939. University of Chicago press.
Deane, Seamus. 1985. Celtic Revivals: Essays in Modern Irish Literature, 1880–1980. Faber and Faber.
Deane, Seamus. 1997. Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing since 1790. Clarendon Press.
Ellman, Richard.1954. The Identity of Yeats. Macmillan.
Fogarty, Matthew. 2022. “The Falconer is Dead: Reassessing Representations of Eternal Recurrence”. International Yeats Studies, Vol. 6, No. 1.
Jeffares, A Norman. 1991. Poems of W. B. Yeats. Macmillan.
Jeffares, A. 2005. Norman. “Yeats’s Maturity: The Poems of The Tower” (1928). In Studies on W. B. Yeats, edited by Richard J. Finneran, Presses Universitaires de Caen, pp. 145-161.
Hillman, James. 1998. The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World. CT: Spring Publications.
MacNeice, Louis.1967. The Poetry of W.B. Yeats. Oxford University Press.
Pearson, Nels C. 2024. "Water, Nation, and Nature in Yeats." Irish Yearbook of English Studies, vol. Clemson University, pp. 118-119.
Seiden, Morton Irving.1975. William Butler Yeats: The Poet as a Mythmaker 1865-1939. Cooper Square Publisher, Inc.
Vendler, Helen. 2007. Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form. Harvard University Press.
Wilson, Edmund. 1931. “W.B. Yeats”. In Axle’s Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930. Scribner’s.
Wood, Michael. 2010. Yeats and Violence. Oxford University Press.
Yeats, John Butler. 1923. Early Memories: Some Chapters of Autobiography. The Cuala Press.
Yeats, William Butler. 1961. “Poetry and Tradition.” Essays and Introductions, edited by Richard J. Finneran, Macmillan, pp. 91–106.

Files

Share

How to cite

Statistics