Yeats

Question 1

Where was Yeats born?

Answer 1

Dublin

Question 2

What becomes a particularly important symbol for Yeats during the 1920s and 30s?

Answer 2

Gyres and spirals of all kinds - explorations of contraries and paradoxes.

Question 3

Of what writer does Yeats imagine living in imitation of in Innisfree?

Answer 3

Thoreau

Question 4

When was “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” written?

Answer 4

c. 1890

Question 5

What is the sentiment of “The Lake Isle of Innisfree?

Answer 5

The speaker imagines living simply with nature in Innisfree, in Ireland. His sentiments recall Thoreau’s; ultimately, we see that this is not what the speaker is actually doing - he just imagines it. This seductive dream occasionally arrests him when he is living his life in the city.

Question 6

Discuss “The Stolen Child.”

Answer 6

“The Stolen Child,” though an early poem presages some of Yeats’s disillusionment with society as well as his interest in Irish folklore. There are enchanting, seductive descriptions of rural Ireland accompanied by a call for a human child to come away and live with the faeries - because the human world is “more full of weeping than you can understand.

Question 7

When was “The Stolen Child” written?

Answer 7

1886

Question 8

What happens at the end of “The Stolen Child”?

Answer 8

The child is convinced to go and stay with the faeries.

Question 9

Leda and the Swan: What does it mean to “Put on God’s knowledge with his power”?

Answer 9

In this poem, the Swan’s divine power stands in for history’s dominion over human experience. To Put on God’s knowledge would be to understand the motives and driving forces behind history rather than just be subject to its will.

Question 10

Compare Yeats with Heaney.

Answer 10

• Southern Ireland vs Norther Ireland
• Yeats in his early career is very interested in high-brow aesthetics (stylized dandy)
• Yeats interested in finding some kind of middle ground between English and Irish culture (hybridization)
• Heaney more antagonistic towards English influence
• Yeats concerned with mythology and politics; Heaney with the “dirty” and real (digging, work, land, artifacts)
• Both interested in Irish representation/reclamation of Irish identity

Question 11

The Second Coming: What is “Spiritus Mundi”?

Answer 11

“The Spirit of the universe” – essentially the collective unconscious; related to Yeats’ interest in the occult, in which he saw poems as a kind of summoning and poets as conduits.

Question 12

The Second Coming: Famous line?

Answer 12

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity

Question 13

The Second Coming: What is the sentiment of this poem? In what context was it written?

Answer 13

This poem imagines the 2000-year cycle of Christian history coming to its end, and muses on what might be next with monstrous anticipation.

Like Byron’s “Darkness”, it imagines a world that is ending and bleak, and ends with uncertainty towards what might be coming next.

This poem was written in the aftermath of WWI.

Question 14

The Second Coming: What are two famous books which take their title from this poem?

Answer 14

• Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

- Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion

Question 15

Leda and the Swan: What is the form of this poem? Why is it significant?

Answer 15

This poem is a broken sonnet, combining Petrarchan and Shakespearean conventions with caesura and disorder. This creates a jarring effect suitable to the violence of the poem and the destruction left in the swan’s wake.

Question 16

Discuss Yeats’ view of history.

Answer 16

The Swan and the “beast’ slouching towards Bethlehem are divine/natural forces that stand in for History. Their identities are known (Jesus/Zeus), but not named – Yeats is interested in the human experience of the assualt of the human by the divine (history).

Question 17

Why does the gyre/circles appear so frequently in Yeats’ work?

Answer 17

Yeats believed that all of history/the world could be described in terms of cycles and patterns. It was basically the center of his entire philosophical world view.

“The soul (or the civilization, the age, and so on) would move from the smallest point of the spiral to the largest before moving along to the other gyre.”

The Second Coming is cyclical, not just imbued with gyre-like imagery but also suggesting that the pattern is about to repeat itself.

Question 18

What is a very bare-bones way of describing Yeats’ career trajectory?

Answer 18

Romanticism –> Occultism –> Modernism

Question 19

Sailing to Byzantium: What is the sentiment of this poem?

Answer 19

Written late in Yeats’ life, the speaker of this poem is an old man who has left his native land, which is more suited to the younger generations (we could read as modernism’s rise in the 20th century). He is a “paltry thing” now, so he is sailing to Byzantium, where he can transcend his failing, earthly body and inhabit a form of gold which will endure for eternity, singing of “what is past, or passing, or to come.”

Masterfully evocative exploration of the aging artist, in which a vibrant mind is confined within an ailing body. Also past/passing/to come –> Yeats’ interest in cyclicity/patterns.