2. • Brief Biography of W. B. Yeats
• Mythical View on Leda and
The Swan
• Yeats’s Real View on Leda and
The Swan
• Criticism
• Recommendation and
Conclusion
3. Brief Biography of W. B. Yeats
• William Butler Yeats (13 June 1865
– 28 January 1939)
• Famous poems are ‘Death, Long-
Legged Fly, He Wishes for the
Cloths of Heaven’, etc.
• Won Nobel Prize in Literature, in
1923
4. • Evil deed of Zeus
• Rape of Spartan queen Leda
• Birth of Helen, Clytemnestra, Castor and
Polydeuces
• “The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.”
- (Leda and the Swan, line-10-11)
5. • Imagery of true history of
human violence
• Wrote during Civil War
• Represents Leda as the Irish
people and God as the
British
6. Criticism
• “Flirts with pornography”
- E. B. Cullingford
• “A nearly perfect sonnet”
- John Unterecker
• “One of the most unimprovable poems ever
written”
- Balachandra Rajan