Yeats's Poetry (SparkNotes Literature Guide)

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Yeats's Poetry (SparkNotes Literature Guide) by William Butler Yeats
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• Language: English
• Publisher: SparkNotes
• Release date: Aug 12, 2014
• ISBN: 9781411478459

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Cover of SparkNotes Guide to Yeats’s Poetry by SparkNotes Editors

Yeats’s Poetry

William Butler Yeats

© 2003, 2007 by Spark Publishing

This Spark Publishing edition 2014 by SparkNotes LLC, an Affiliate of Barnes & Noble

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Contents

Context

Analysis

Themes, Motifs and Symbols

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

Adam's Curse

The Wild Swans at Coole

An Irish Airman foresees his Death

The Second Coming

Sailing to Byzantium

Leda and the Swan

Byzantium

The Circus Animals' Desertion

Study Questions

Context

William Butler Yeats was born in Dublin in

1865

to a chaotic, artistic family. His father, a portrait painter, moved the family to London when Yeats was two, and William spent much of his childhood moving between the cold urban landscape of the metropolis and the congenial countryside of County Sligo, Ireland, where his mother’s parents lived. An aesthete even as a boy, Yeats began writing verse early, and published his first work in

1885

. In

1889

, Yeats met the Irish patriot, revolutionary, and beauty Maud Gonne. He fell immediately in love with her, and remained so for the rest of his life; virtually every reference to a beloved in Yeats’s poetry can be understood as a reference to Maud Gonne. Tragically, Gonne did not return his love, and though they remained closely associated (she portrayed the lead role in several of his plays), they were never romantically involved. Many years later, Yeats proposed to her daughter—and was rejected again.

Yeats lived during a tumultuous time in Ireland, during the political rise and fall of Charles Stuart Parnell, the Irish Revival, and the civil war. Partly because of his love for the politically active Maud Gonne, Yeats devoted himself during the early part of his career to the Literary Revival and to Irish patriotism, seeking to develop a new religious iconography based on Irish mythology. (Though he was of Protestant parentage, Yeats played little part in the conflict between Catholics and Protestants that tore Ireland apart during his lifetime.) He quickly rose to literary prominence, and helped to found what became the Abbey Theatre, one of the most important cultural institutions in Ireland, at which he worked with such luminaries as Augusta Gregory and the playwright John Synge. In

1923

, Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

One of the most remarkable facts about Yeats’s career as a poet is that he only reached his full powers late in