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Relationship Between Yeats And Nietzsche

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Abstract: W.B.Yeats has certainly not suffered lack of critical attention, but the Yeats-Nietzsche connection has not been dealt with fully. Yeats’s later work can, more accurately be read and understood in the light of Nietzsche’s role in the development of Yeats’s thought. Yeats’s connection with Nietzsche is not simply a matter of literary influence; both of them are united by a common philosophic temperament and way of understanding the world. This paper is an attempt to study the influence that Nietzsche had upon Yeats, and what made it possible: the underlying kinship of a similar disposition. Key Words: Disposition, Existence, Imagination, Influence, Kinship, Philosophy, Tragedy. INTRODUCTION: The question of influence among writers …show more content…

Nietzsche (1844-1900). Yeats probably first came into contact with Nietzsche's writings in 1902, either in Thomas Common's translated anthology Nietzsche as Critic, Philosopher, Poet and Prophet (1901) or in a copy of Thus Spake Zarathustra (one of the few works of Nietzsche to have been translated in whole at the time) given to him by John Quinn. Doubtless, however, Yeats was familiar with some of Nietzsche's major concepts before this date, even if on a less authoritative basis than direct reading would have provided. There are passages from his 1897 essay that might attest to his earlier familiarity. The Nietzschean vogue (or "Neo-Nietzschean clatter", in Pound's words) that existed in literary circles in England-during the late 1800's and early 1900's has been explored thoroughly and comprehensively by David S. Thatcher and Yeats must have absorbed something of Nietzsche's thought simply by virtue of having been part of this particular milieu. A letter of May 15, 1903 credits John Quinn with having first introduced Yeats to Nietzsche's work and suggests clearly that Yeats was at this time familiar specifically with The Birth of …show more content…

• •• The nature is conscious of the most extreme degree of deception, and is wrought to a frenzy of desire for truth of self. If Phase 9 had the greatest possible "belief in its own desire", there is now the greatest possible belief in all values created by personality. It is therefore before all else the phase of the hero, of the man who overcomes himself, and so no longer needs, like Phase 10, the submission of others, or, like Phai8 11,

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