A Study Guide for William Butler Yeats's "The Wild Swans at Coole"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for William Butler Yeats's "The Wild Swans at Coole," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Sep 28, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535840545

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The Wild Swans at Coole

William Butler Yeats

1917

Introduction

William Butler Yeats was one of the twentieth century's great English-language poets. The Wild Swans at Coole, a poem he wrote and published midway through his career, exemplifies his romantic style. In this poem, as in other works, Yeats draws on mythological symbolism and reflects upon his own advancing age and what that might mean for his place in the world, both as a man and as a poet. Although Yeats firmly adhered to traditional metered verse throughout his life, his friendship with modernist poet Ezra Pound influenced his writing. In The Wild Swans at Coole, for example, the meter (the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables), while easily detected, is loosely constructed, shifting from line to line with no distinct pattern. This loose metric structure can be considered a transitional form between traditional metered verse and modern free verse.

The Wild Swans at Coole was published in The Little Review in June 1917 and later collected in the book The Wild Swans at Coole in 1917. An expanded edition of The Wild Swans at Coole was published in 1919. This poem was written in 1915 or 1916 while Yeats was staying with his friend and sponsor, Lady Gregory, at her estate, Coole Park, in western Ireland, where he often spent summers. Yeats wrote over seventy books of poetry, fiction, drama, essays, and criticism. The Wild Swans at Coole is available in most volumes that collect the best of his writing, including the second revised edition of The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, edited by Richard J. Finneran and published in