Yeats as a modern poet
Q. 1.
Discuss W.B. Yeats as a modern poet.
Answer:-
William Butler Yeats, one of the modern poets, influences his contemporaries as well as successors, such as T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and W.B. Auden. Though three common themes in Yeats’ poetry are love, Irish Nationalism and mysticism, but modernism is the overriding theme in his writings. Yeats started his long literary career as a romantic poet and gradually evolved into a modernist poet. As a typical modern poet he regrets for post-war modern world which is now in a disorder and chaotic situation and laments for the past. Yeats as a modern poet is anti-rationalist in his attitude which is expressed through his passion for occultisms or mysticism. He is a prominent poet in modern times for his sense of moral wholeness of humanity and history.
Yeats is regarded as the seed of modernism. He is intensely aware of man in history and of the soul in eternity. Yeats is a representative modern poet and presents the spirit of the age in his poetry. For this, he uses myth, symbolism, juxtaposition, colloquial language and literary allusions as a device to express the anxiety of modernity. After the World war-I people got totally shattered and they suffered from frustration, boredom, anxiety and loneliness. Yeats has used different type of landscape to symbolize the spiritual and psychological states of modern man.
“The Second Coming” is a superb example of Yeats’ modernism as in this poem Yeats portrays the modern chaotic and disordered condition after World War I and the poet tends to escape from this situation.
“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,”
Then, a powerful expression of Yeats’ agony facing old age appears at the beginning of “Sailing to Byzantium”:
“That is no country for old men. The young/ In one another’s arms, birds in the tress/ Those dying generations – at their song.”
In
Discuss W.B. Yeats as a modern poet.
Answer:-
William Butler Yeats, one of the modern poets, influences his contemporaries as well as successors, such as T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and W.B. Auden. Though three common themes in Yeats’ poetry are love, Irish Nationalism and mysticism, but modernism is the overriding theme in his writings. Yeats started his long literary career as a romantic poet and gradually evolved into a modernist poet. As a typical modern poet he regrets for post-war modern world which is now in a disorder and chaotic situation and laments for the past. Yeats as a modern poet is anti-rationalist in his attitude which is expressed through his passion for occultisms or mysticism. He is a prominent poet in modern times for his sense of moral wholeness of humanity and history.
Yeats is regarded as the seed of modernism. He is intensely aware of man in history and of the soul in eternity. Yeats is a representative modern poet and presents the spirit of the age in his poetry. For this, he uses myth, symbolism, juxtaposition, colloquial language and literary allusions as a device to express the anxiety of modernity. After the World war-I people got totally shattered and they suffered from frustration, boredom, anxiety and loneliness. Yeats has used different type of landscape to symbolize the spiritual and psychological states of modern man.
“The Second Coming” is a superb example of Yeats’ modernism as in this poem Yeats portrays the modern chaotic and disordered condition after World War I and the poet tends to escape from this situation.
“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,”
Then, a powerful expression of Yeats’ agony facing old age appears at the beginning of “Sailing to Byzantium”:
“That is no country for old men. The young/ In one another’s arms, birds in the tress/ Those dying generations – at their song.”
In