In his poem "Sailing to Byzantium," Yeats rejects his perceptions of the sensual mortal world and fondly imagines a paradise of intellectual intransience in Byzantium. The impermanence of human life is recounted, for Yeats who himself is a part of...

In William Butler Yeats' "Among School Children," the speaker addresses his anxieties about aging. Manipulating traditional rhyme schemes, Yeats articulates the impermanence of youth to examine the need to unify the body and the soul. Although the...

The iniquitous nature of unrequited love plays man the subservient jester to his indifferent queen. In his poem "The Cap and Bells" W. B. Yeats seeks to convey the message that unrequited love causes a man to give and give of himself until he has...

W. B. Yeats (1865-1939) was very influenced by the French symbolist movement and he is often regarded as the most important symbolist poet of the twentieth century. Yeats felt 'metaphors are not profound enough to be moving,' so his poems heavily...

When writers use quotations, allusions, or traditions, they are referring to a piece of work or an event that has occurred prior to the moment of their writing. They use the past to help shape the work that they are crafting in the present. T.S....

In his poem “Among School Children,” W.B. Yeats describes his feelings upon entering a classroom full of young children as a sixty year old man. The beauty of the children that he encounters in the classroom leads him to question the value of the...

W.B. Yeats is considered one of the greatest Irish writers due to his eloquent, ‘otherworldly’ early poetry and many of his later dramas and works for which he received the Nobel Prize. Often associated with the Irish Literary Revival, Yeats’...

September of 1913 was the height of one of the most important trade union disputes in Irish history and the poem "September 1913" is based around this. Yeats was, at the time, a great supporter of the lower classes and attacks middle-class...

William Butler Yeats articulates a variety of opinions concerning the arts in his poem Lapis Lazuli. As the poem begins the speaker appears to refute a definition of artistic purpose, but as the poem closes the speaker’s words illuminate a...

Contrary to the optimistic nature of the title, “Easter 1916”, Yeats’ poem speaks of death, sacrifice, rebellion and politics. It is not often that Yeats deals with the subject of the Irish Independence movement. The only other expressly political...

William Butler Yeats, the esteemed twentieth-century poet, was in love with the Irish nationalist Maud Gonne; his poem “The Two Trees” was originally written for her. Gonne was very devoted to rather uncompromising ideologies, but in this poem...

In 1919, the year “The Second Coming” was written, World War I, one of the deadliest wars in history, had just ended and Ireland was in the throes of a war to fight British control. Tensions between Catholics and Protestants and those of different...

In “To the Rose upon the Rood of Time,” the speaker asks the Rose to come near him while he sings of old Irish tales, such as Cuchulain’s fighting the sea, the Druid and Fergus, and the Rose’s own sadness. He again invites the Rose close to him...

Although the world has evolved in many ways since Yeats was around, his poetry remains significant in the modern era. By simply scrolling through social media, flipping through T.V channels or listening to the radio, we are constantly reminded...

Writing from the late 1880s to the dawn of modern Ireland in the first two decades of the 20th century, Yeats and Synge penned their works during a period of national liminality; or what critic Seamus Deane refers to as “the long process of its...

"The Wild Swans at Coole" is a poem of equal parts reticence and disclosure. Though the substances are the same, a logic of proportion fails; reticence is disclosure. The poem is about mortality, transience, disillusionment, and loss; more...

Although the world has evolved in many ways since Yeats was around, his poetry remains significant in the modern era. By simply scrolling through social media, flipping through T.V channels or listening to the radio, we are constantly reminded...

The image of the swan is thoroughly explored throughout Yeats’ poetry, in which it not only heightens the overall textual integrity but also allows the reader to ingest the suggestions that are intricate and simultaneous as posed by each Yeats...

Utilizing multidisciplinary knowledge gained from analysis of critical readings grants the individual the ability to better understand that William Butler Yeats’ thought was profoundly dialectical and that for every truth he found, he embraced a...

One of the most sensational aspects of W.B. Yeats’ life is his unsuccessful romancing of Maud Gonne. It is widely acknowledged that she served as muse and inspiration for many of Yeats’ poems, and ‘Her Praise’ seems to be an example of such work....

A study of the poetry of William Butler Yeats illuminates the dichotomies of human experiences, dichotomies that he explores through his skillful manipulation of language and form. Yeats’ literary genius and the organic unity of his work are most...

Whilst this is a credible assessment of Yeats’s later works and can be supported through analysis of the poems ‘Crazy Jane talks with a Bishop’ and ‘The Tower’, it is a limited and superficial view which fails to grasp the metaphorical meaning of...

William Butler Yeats’ Sailing to Byzantium (1926) is one of the more remarkable poems from The Tower, a celebrated collection of poems published in 1929. The poem is remarkable partly because of its highly suggestive and ambiguous language, which...

In many of William Butler Yeats’s works, he creates a seemingly inescapable gyre or cycle that history and human lives follow. In The Second Coming, Yeats examines the cycle of history in which every two thousand years, a new messiah arrives. In...