About W.B. Yeats
William Butler Yeats.
William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet, dramatist, prose writer and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature.
Born in Dublin, Ireland, on June 13, 1865, William Butler Yeats was the son of a well-known Irish painter, John Butler Yeats. He spent his childhood in County Sligo, where his parents were raised, and in London. He returned to Dublin at the age of fifteen to continue his education and study painting, but quickly discovered he preferred poetry. Born into the Anglo-Irish landowning class, Yeats became involved with the Celtic Revival, a movement against the cultural influences of English rule in Ireland during the Victorian period, which sought to promote the spirit of Ireland's native heritage. Though Yeats never learned Irish Gaelic himself, his writing at the turn of the century drew extensively from sources in Irish mythology and folklore. Also a potent influence on his poetry was the Irish revolutionary Maud Gonne, whom he met in 1889, a woman equally famous for her passionate nationalist politics and her beauty. Though she married another man in 1903 and grew apart from Yeats (and Yeats himself was eventually married to another woman, Georgie Hyde Lees), she remained a powerful figure in his poetry.
Yeats was deeply involved in politics in Ireland, and in the twenties, despite Irish independence from England, his verse reflected a pessimism about the political situation in his country and the rest of Europe, paralleling the increasing conservatism of his American counterparts in London, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. His work after 1910 was strongly influenced by Pound, becoming more modern in its concision and imagery, but Yeats never abandoned his strict adherence to traditional verse forms. He had a life-long interest in mysticism and the occult, which was off-putting to some readers, but he remained uninhibited in advancing his idiosyncratic philosophy, and his poetry continued to grow stronger as he grew older. Appointed a senator of the Irish Free State in 1922, he is remembered as an important cultural leader, as a major playwright (he was one of the founders of the famous Abbey Theatre in Dublin), and as one of the very greatest poets—in any language—of the century. W. B. Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1923 and died in 1939 at the age of seventy-three.
Q.1 Analyses 'The Second Coming as a Pandemic Poem'
Answer :-
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
As a Pandemic poem
Once I heard that no one writer, author or poet’s writing would be apart from their contemporary time. In this same way poems of W.B. Yeats are also connected with their contemporary time and events.
The poem ‘ Second Coming’ is a very interesting and fascinating poem by W.B. Yeats. It was written in 1919. During the time when the Flu pandemic was out bruck on the world. In the weeks preceding Yeats's writing of the poem, his pregnant wife Georgie Hyde-Lees caught the virus and was very close to death. The highest death rates of the pandemic were among pregnant women—in some areas, they had up to a 70 percent death rate. While his wife was convalescing, he wrote "The Second Coming"
In the first stanza of poem, there are two lines which is about the reference of this pandemic:
“The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;”
These lines are about that horrible situation of 1918-19 Flu pandemic.
I took it that the tide - a tide of violence - has been held back but now it has been let loose and the elements of the tide i.e. blood, violence and anarchy, will soon 'drown' the world.
Also 'blood-dimmed' gives me a sense of coming darkness i.e. when night is falling and the setting sun reflecting on water gives it a reddish glow
So, concluding all the things we can say that the poem, ‘Second Coming’ is the pandemic poem.
Q.2 Evaluate 'On Being Asked for a War Poem.’
‘On Being Asked for a War poem’ is a very interesting and very short poem by yeast. It’s publication history very interesting.
-"On being asked for a War Poem" is a poem by William Butler Yeats written on February 6, 1915 in response to a request by Henry James that Yeats compose a political poem about World War I.
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-Yeats changed the poem's title from "To a friend who has asked me to sign his manifesto to the neutral nations" to "A Reason for Keeping Silent" before sending it in a letter to James, which Yeats wrote at Coole Park on August 20, 1915.
-The poem was prefaced with a note stating: "It is the only thing I have written of the war or will write, so I hope it may not seem unfitting."
-The poem was first published in Edith Wharton's The Book of the Homeless in 1916 as "A Reason for Keeping Silent". When it was later reprinted in The Wild Swans at Coole, the title was changed to "On being asked for a War Poem".
Summary of the poem :-
The poem is divided in two two parts. First part is made with three lines and the second part is made with the remaining three lines. The first part is about the time when the political voice was stronger than the voice of poets. The whole poem is about a poet who had shut their mouth and just wrote about a young girl.
https://interestingliterature.com/2020/06/wb-yeats-being-asked-war-poem-analysis/
The poem discusses the power of political parties and statesmen. People have to listen to the right voice instead of the wrong and fake voice. Poet also mentioned the situation of the poet during that time. Poet wasn't allowed to speak against power and powerful statesmen.
Thank you……
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