This document provides a biography and overview of the Irish poet William Butler Yeats. It discusses his fascination with Irish mythology and nationalism. Key events in his life included his relationship with Maud Gonne and marriage in middle age. His poetry dealt with themes of Irish identity, nationalism, and the complex effects of British colonial rule. Poems summarized include "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," which imagines a free rural Ireland, and "Easter 1916" about the complicated reactions to the Easter Rising. "Second Coming" presents a frightening vision of the collapse of the old order and birth of a new unknown era symbolized by a beastly figure.

1. WILLIAM BUTLER
YEATS
1865-1939

2. Biography
 Born in Dublin, Anglo-Irish family
 Fascinated by Irish mythology and the occult
 Spiritual by nature, but couldn’t accept Christian
dogma
 Caught up in the rise of the “Fenians”, 1890’s
nationalism and the demand for Irish home rule
 1889 met Maud Gonne
 heiress and nationalist
 Became infatuated with her
 Proposed several times, but was refused
 She married another revolutionary
 1908 began an affair with her

3. Bio - continued
 1916 finally marries at age 51
 Met wife in his occult clubs
 She was an “spirit” or “automatic” writer
 Marriage was successful
 2 children
 1922-1928 a senator in the Irish Free State

4. Intro
 Adopts many “masks” and approaches
 radical nationalist
 classical liberal
 reactionary conservative and
 millenarian nihilist
 The gyre:
 Two opposing wheels set in motion
 Governing creation
 Cyclical theory of existence:
 All this has happened before, all this will happen again
 his work is varied, contradictory
 Post-colonial writer
 effects of British empire/colonization on literary production.
 Nationalism, anti-nationalism, the creation of a national identity
 Rebellion, revolution, resistance to colonization
 vacillating and ambivalent attitudes towards the colonizer
 hybridity

5. Art/Politics
 Yeats proposes
 A connection between art and politics that his
writing brings to mind
 In “Man and the Echo,” for example, Yeats asks:
 “Did that play of mine send out / Certain men the
English shot?” (lines 11-12).
 The play, Cathleen ni Houlihan, co-authored by Yeats with
Lady Gregory, may have helped mobilize the
revolutionaries who participated in the Easter Rising of
1916.
 draws attention to the political power of his own writing
also brings up questions about the effect of art on
politics in general.

6. Art/Politics
 Literature in this sense is not merely
decorative or confined to rarefied academic
circles,
 something with the potential to touch and
influence events in the real world.
 helped to shape attitudes, however,
 also tells us much about existing attitudes,
 offers significant insights into Irish culture and history.
 conflicted literary responses to this history

7. “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”
 Themes:
 Longing for an idealized pastoral Ireland;
 imagining rural self-reliance and escape from
urban desolation
 mythologizing and constructing an independent,
non-British Ireland.

8. “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”
 Gives some sense of his early Romantic
influences
 reveals Yeats as Irish nation-builder and myth-
maker
 How does he imagine a free Ireland here?
 parallels between the speaker’s intention to “live
alone” (line 4) and plant his “Nine bean-rows” (line 3),
and a self-sufficient Ireland.

9. Innisfree
 The island’s name
 notions of hybridity and nationalism?
 Contradictory?
 Innisfree is literally a “free island,”
 real location in the west of Ireland
 free from British rule
 also a hybrid word, combining English with Gaelic,
 How the two cultures are intertwined.
 Yeats made a conscious decision not to use the Gaelic spelling.
 mythologizing an idyllic Ireland,
 this is the “real” Ireland, not the streets of Dublin or elsewhere.
 represents the life (the heart), the center, of Ireland, and as such
becomes a national symbol.
 constructing a national identity separate from British identity.

10. “Easter 1916”
 Easter rising in
Ireland 1916
 An attempt to end
British rule in Ireland
 Irish republican forces
seize key locations in
Dublin
 Put down by the
British in a matter of
days
 Leaders arrested,
high ranking ones
executed

11. “Easter 1916”
 Ambivalent tone
 Did not please some of his friends
 fluctuating view of the Irish revolutionaries who
carried out the rebellion.
 Look for indication of class distinction
 sincere respect
 also some disparaging remarks
 cannot be entirely erased by recognition of the rebels’
martyrdom

12. “Easter 1916”
 Too long a sacrifice / Can make a stone of the heart”
 admires the commitment of the revolutionaries
 questions their tactics and their judgment.
 Believes that the English government may eventually
grant the Irish their independence
 asks: “Was it needless death after all? For England may
keep faith” (lines 67-68).
 Moreover, he wonders: “what if excess of love /
Bewildered [the slain nationalists] till they died?” (lines
72-73).
 By the final lines, the refrain: all “changed, changed
utterly: / A terrible beauty is born” (lines 79-80)
 What is “born” here? What does Yeats think of Ireland’s
future and why?

13. “Second Coming”
 Themes:
 One historical epoch is ending:—in chaos
 while another epoch—unknown and potentially
frightening—is being born.
 Key Passages:
 “The falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall
apart; the centre cannot hold,” lines 2-3;
 “A shape with lion body and the head of a man, / A
gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, / Is moving its slow
thighs,” lines 14-16
 “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, /
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” lines 21-
22.

14. “Second Coming”
 presents an explosive vision of the coming
era.
 historical birth
 catastrophic proportions
 the speaker yields to his own fevered
imaginings
 What is this beast?
 Why does it appear after “twenty centuries of stony
sleep”?
 Why is the new era imagined as half man, half beast?

15. “Second Coming”
 turns Christian rhetoric against itself
 In Christian terms:
 the Second Coming is the end of the world when all
are judged and sent to their respective fates.
 Yeats’s scenario:
 the Christian era is not the entire or most significant
aspect of history;
 it is dismissed as merely “twenty centuries of stony sleep”
(line 19)
 about to be replaced by another historical epoch
 disturbing, coarse, and fragmented, but perhaps just as
long-lived as the former.

16. “Second Coming”
 the falcon and the falconer
 relationship to the disintegrating center :
 “The falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall apart
 the centre cannot hold” [lines 2-3]).
 What do the “falcon” and “falconer” represent?
 Christ and the modern era?
 A more generalized concept of a strong leader and his
public?
 something more abstract?
 Yeats’s politics were ambivalent at this point:
 anti-democratic/pro-fascist tendencies
 speaker is worried about the loss of order in the world
 disorder growing out of the disturbances of war and
revolution