1. William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
Performer - Culture & Literature
Marina Spiazzi, Marina Tavella,
Margaret Layton © 2013

2. W.B. Yeats
1. Life
1865  born in Dublin, Ireland, into a middle-class family belonging to the Protestant minority.
His father was a free thinker
with an anti-clerical attitude.
As a student, Yeats was attracted
to mystical doctrines and magic.
Performer - Culture & Literature

3. 1. Life 1889  met Maud Gonne, an actress and a patriot
W.B. Yeats
1. Life
1889  met Maud Gonne, an actress and a patriot
who led him into the politics of the Irish
Republican Brotherhood.
1890s  met Lady Gregory who
supported his project of the Abbey
Theatre, a literary theatre to fight
the commercial theatre.
1893  published a series of essays,
The Celtic Twilight, to promote an Irish renaissance.
Maud Gonne
Performer - Culture & Literature

4. 1. Life 1922  He was a member of the Irish Senate from 1922 to 1928.
W.B. Yeats
1. Life
1922  He was a member of the Irish Senate from 1922 to 1928.
1923  In December he was the first Irish author to be awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.
1939  He died in France.
W. B. Yeats and his wife Georgie in 1923.
Performer - Culture & Literature

5. 2. The Celtic Revival Britain introduced a ban on the Gaelic
W.B. Yeats
2. The Celtic Revival
Britain introduced a ban on the Gaelic
language in Ireland
Native Irish literature was in danger of being lost.
For Yeats the artist’s role was
the creation of a new culture, based on Ireland’s past.
Yeats collected Irish folklore
and hoped in an Irish cultural renaissance.
Performer - Culture & Literature

6. 2. The Celtic Revival At first he shared the Nationalists’ concern.
W.B. Yeats
2. The Celtic Revival
At first he shared the Nationalists’ concern.
Grew disenchanted with the Nationalist movement
he saw it dominated by the values
of the Catholic middle classes.
Changed his political attitude after the cruel treatment by the British of the 1916 Easter Rebellion
gradually placed his sympathies with the ‘moderate’ members of the government.
Performer - Culture & Literature

7. 3. Yeats’s themes Faith in the beauty and eternity of art.
W.B. Yeats
3. Yeats’s themes
Faith in the beauty and eternity of art.
The relationship between the poet and the Irish people and tradition.
Death  unlike an animal, which simply dies, man dies many times before his death.
The heroic individual  loneliness characterises his heroes because their superior qualities distinguish them from the common man.
Benbulben, County Sligo, Ireland.
Performer - Culture & Literature

8. W.B. Yeats
4. Yeats’s style
Employed antithesis, oxymoron and paradox  his imagination worked through the conflict and resolution of opposites.
Complete coincidence between period and stanza  made possible by frequent enjambement.
Sensual and sensory language  dynamic and energetic
syntax, rich in verbs of motion and action.
Performer - Culture & Literature

9. 5. Yeats’s vision of history
W.B. Yeats
5. Yeats’s vision of history
Life and all of its phases
Cycles spiralling upwards or downwards towards a fixed climax until
THE CYCLE REVERSES
Performer - Culture & Literature

10. From this civilisation’s death, another civilisation arises.
W.B. Yeats
5. Yeats’s cyclical theory of history
While one civilisation’s people are born, live and die; they move towards their own annihilation.
From this civilisation’s death, another civilisation arises.
The point at which one era’s struggle for death coincides with the next era’s struggle for birth provokes a violent turn of the gyre.
Performer - Culture & Literature

11. 5. Gyres ‘A single gyre resembles a funnel,
W.B. Yeats
5. Gyres
The gyre is one of Yeats’s favourite motifs, based on the idea that history occurs in cycles.
‘A single gyre resembles a funnel,
which begins at a fixed point.
From this point the spiral grows
wider and wider until it reaches
its maximum growth. At this climax, the single gyre “begins to retrace its path in the opposite direction.’
Performer - Culture & Literature

12. W.B. Yeats
6. Yeats’s symbolism
To Yeats the symbol has a ‘visionary’ dimension, it offers ‘revelation’. .
It has an effective role in shaping both the individual and the collective consciousness.
It is not only a device he uses to present his themes. It is a theme in itself, in which truths are embodied, in all their complexity.
Performer - Culture & Literature

13. W.B. Yeats
6. Yeats’s symbolism
‘I can not now think symbols less than the greatest of all powers, whether they are used consciously by the masters of magic, or half-unconsciously by their successors, the poet, the musician and the artist.’
(W.B. Yeats, Magic, 1901)
Byzantium symbolises  Unity of Being, in which religious, aesthetic and practical life are one.
“And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.”
Performer - Culture & Literature

14. The unchanging, flawless ideal
W.B. Yeats
6. Yeats’s symbolism
‘I can not now think symbols less than the greatest of all powers, whether they are used consciously by the masters of magic, or half-unconsciously by their successors, the poet, the musician and the artist.’
(W.B. Yeats, Magic, 1901)
The swan symbolises
The unchanging, flawless ideal
A violent divine force
The Wild Swans at Coole
Leda and the Swan
Performer - Culture & Literature