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The 1910s witnessed the
transition of Yeats from early Romanticism to Modernism, under the influence
of the poetry and criticism of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. In style, Yeats
developed a more mature way of writing poems— a plain style with more
precise images. The dream-like illusions in his national poems were replaced
by profound thoughts of Irish society and history, and even by irony and
attack on the contemporary events at that time.
“Easter 1916” is a poem in memory of the Easter Rising of the
Irish patriots against the oppression:
Hearts with one purpose alone
Though summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream
The horse that comes from the road.
In this period, Yeats developed a mysterious theory of
circle, which included history, imagination and mythology in light of occult
symbols. Human experience, to him, repeats itself over and over again on
different levels. This view was best laid out in his philosophical book,
A Vision, and its light also shed on some of his poems. The following
stanza from “The Second Coming” is one example:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosened 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.
The poems in The Wild Swans at Coole dealt
with civilization and expressed the poet’s longing for a quiet and elegant
aristocratic life. In the poem, “The Wild Swans at Coole”, the wild swan
symbolized the beginning of life.
I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,
And now my heart is sore.
All’s changed since I, hearing at twilight,
The first time on this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread.
Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold,
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.
The last phase is from 1926 until his death in 1939,
including the publications of The Tower and The Winding Stair. The subjects
in this period ranged from art, philosophy to politics, from love, youth to
death. The port focused more on personal emotions than before. The style was
plainer and tended to be colloquial. Many powerful poems concerned about the
eternal beauty of art, such as “Sailing to Byzantium” and “Byzantium”.
No poet of the twentieth century has been more
persuasively then Yeats imposed his personal experience to history by art.
As a modernist poet, Yeats has won the acknowledgements of many readers by
his various subject matters, brilliant symbols, well-versed lines and his
usual occultism. T. S. Eliot has referred to Yeats as “the greatest poet of
our age— certainly the greatest in this language”.
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