The Conflict Between Physical Decrepitude and Libidinal Excess in Yeats's Late Poetry Laura Byrnes College

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 Yeats’s sexual excess. That is that it represents his mental youth. Therefore, the more compelling conflict dramatised is one between his body’s decline and his continued mental strength. Such a superficial analysis of his later works perhaps aligns itself with the Formalist tradition, thus rejecting intentional fallacy which plays a significant role in Yeats’s poetry. This interpretation also neglects other debates which are highlighted through an analysis of his poems, like the conflict between poet and his works and the poet and his literary tradition. When one considers Yeats’s fears of mortality, his dissatisfaction with the Western Literary tradition and Ireland during the civil war, the frustration, generated through the series of conflict, that underpins his later works can be extrapolated to embody numerous frustrations, not purely carnal such as feelings of inadequacy and misplacement. Yeats’s physical decline and subsequent impotence can be read as a loss of power and...