WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

Yeats was born in 1865 in Landymount Avenue in Dublin as a member of a Protestant Anglo-Irish family. An important person in his life was his father John Butler Yeats, a painter, who did not receive the recognition he deserved. He attended the Godolphin School in Hommersmith. Later he attended High School in Dublin and studied art at the Metropolitan School. During the first period he wrote in the style of William Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites, he tried to revive the medieval spirit in literature. Some of the best of his work was included in collected Poems of 1895 and The Wind Among the Reeds (1899). They included The Celtic Twilight (1898), The Secret Rose (1897), The Shadowy Waters (1900). Between 1887-1900 Yeats spent a lot of his time in London where he was in contact with Oscar Wilde and Bernard Shaw and in touch with contemporary trends in French literature, taking a great interest in the work of Stephen Mallarme and Villiers de L'Isle- Adam. For a period of ten years he devoted himself to drama. Helped by Lady Gregory, he founded the Irish Literary Theatre, but he did not give up poetry for good. A remarkable change took place and even his first collection The Green Helmet (1910) marked the break with the influence of the 1880s. His final style did not crystallize until 1928 when he published The Tower. In 1932 he founded with Shaw the Irish Academy of Letters, and a year later he published one of the best anthologies of the time- Oxford Book of Modern Verse.

Yeats is a very complex poet, even a paradoxically one. We can speak of unity although his work is built upon different, even opposite themes, illustrating "many kinds of dogma" as Irving Seiden said. His tendency in poetry is a result of his position to make him a scientist. His interest in religion seems to be born from the "ideological quarrel father-son". His themes find their roots in every Irish legend he has read. Among these the most frequent are the themes of heliolatry, transmigration and ritual murder. Every theme is connected with spiritual death and rebirth, and the supernatural realm of pure being.

An important aspect of his work is that he reduces all the times to the time of the work. "His memory and his vision were past and future destroying time"-Irving Seiden. In an essay called The Symbolism of Poetry Yeats asserts that the power of poetry comes from symbols. Among Yeats's frequent symbols we can mention the Mask, the tree of life, the bird, and the rose. In the essay The Kabbalah Unveiled he reveals the secret of the two trees: the tree of life and of knowledge. Another powerful symbol, the Great Wheel is used to define the Absolute, being a macrocosmic symbol. The symbol of the Rose is also presented as having multiple meanings. It is not only "eternal beauty" but also a compound of "Beauty and Peace", of "Beauty and Wisdom". As a result of Yeats"s tendency to unify contraries he explains that he has substituted the rose for the lotus as the proper flower to blossom on the Tree of Life. The bird is a symbol for enduring work of art, while Mask can be seen as a process of impersonality which is not a constant process of depersonalization, of getting away from the ego but on the contrary, it is embodying as many egos as possible. Thus, Yeats's purity is multi- coloured and rooted into complex life, which come from an essential belief in man.

In Sailing to Byzantium Yeats creates Another World- a spiritual one- towards which the spirit travels. The poem is a journey from the condition of the body in the first stanza to that of the spirit in the second part of the poem, from the temporal to the eternal. The body changes, becomes older and finally dies but the soul through a succession of bodies. Reading the poem we can notice that the song of the birds remains in a world where everything dies: "those dying generations- at their song"; "Whatever is begotten, born and dies".

The speaker is aware of his condition; that is why he wants to travel in Another World. He paradoxically travels backwards in space and time to Byzantium, the capital of the Roman Eastern Empire, founded by the Greeks in the seventh century: "the holy city of Byzantium". This is a symbol of timeless spiritual world opposed to the natural physical world.

The third stanza is describing the condition of the artist in contrast with the man. The first part of the stanza sounds like a calling upon the sages of Byzantium, while the last lines focus on the creator's sufferings and pain, the artist lost in his work. The last stanza envisages himself- as a man- transcended by taking the form of a work of art whose function is to transmit art: "...to sing / To lords and ladies of Byzantium / Of what is past, or passing or to come".

The symbol of the bird that is implicitly present in the whole poem is chosen by the speaker to be the embodiment of his soul. In fact from that bird- present only in the first stanza- remains the song or the work of art.

Leda and the Swan is one of Yeats's most interesting poems. The central idea is the intersection between the human and divinity. It can be perceive either as a religious reference to Jesus Christ and his origin- half man, half divine- or as a reference to the process of creation.

The poem confirms Yeats's concern with Greek mythology. Leda was a human being, the wife of the king of Sparta, Tyndareus. Zeus visited her as a swan. She laid down with him and also laid down with her husband. Leda gave birth to two pairs of twins, one of which was Pollux and Helen- the children of Tyndareus. Helen in her turn becomes the wife of the king of Sparta, Menelaus, and caused the destruction of Troy and the death of Agamemnon. Yeats's poem refers only to the moment of the legend, when Zeus descends as a swan and possesses Leda.

Zeus takes the form of a swan that is the symbol of purity, majesty and grace. This symbol is stressed by the white colour that is connected with the sun, the messenger of the gods. Leda, on the other hand, is characterized by the word "dark", suggesting her earthly origin. Yeats insists on the difference: she is helpless and terrified while Zeus is powerful and indifferent. Everything is suggested: "her helpless breast", "those terrified vague fingers", "feathered glory", "her loosening thighs", "brute blood of the air".

The third stanza breaks the poem. It is a vision announced by the present moment. The violence now and here will destroy a civilisation there: "A shudder in the loins engenders there/ The broken wall."