The Irish Troubles: Yeat's Poetry Essays

On May 11, Yeats wrote to Lady Gregory that he had received a letter from his long-time muse Maud Gonne, who had written from France with the belief that the revolutionaries had “raised the Irish cause again to a position of tragic dignity” (White 372). He went on to relate his own attempts to interpret recent events: “I am trying to write a poem on the men executed—‘terrible beauty has been born again.’” (Wade 613). The phrase “terrible beauty,” with its initial “t” and final “ty,” seems to echo Gonne’s “tragic dignity,” though the negatively charged “terrible” strains against “beauty,” making Yeats’s phrase more ambivalent than Gonne’s. Yeats may not have used the word “tragic,” but a sense of tragedy pervades “Easter, 1916.” Recalling life before the

When Yeats moved back to London to pursue his interest in Arts, he met famous writers like Maud Gonne. The Poem “To Ireland in the Coming Times” is one of the poems Yeats wrote in 1892 and was published in The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends. “Know, that I would accounted

     One may question, what did the Irish have against the English? The answer one will find is, plenty! In Ireland, the landlords and agents and in American there were bosses and mine owners. The landlords in Ireland lived on large estates in the Irish countryside and charged

William Butler Yeats is one of the most esteemed poets in 20th century literature and is well known for his Irish poetry. While Yeats was born in Ireland, he spent most of his adolescent years in London with his family. It wasn’t until he was a teenager that he later moved back to Ireland. He attended the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin and joined the Theosophical Society soon after moving back. He was surrounded by Irish influences most of his life, but it was his commitment to those influences and his heritage that truly affected his poetry. William Butler Yeats’s poetry exemplifies how an author’s Irish identity can help create and influence his work.

The Easter Uprising of 1916 was an event that happened at the tail end of a long list of events that would forever change Ireland. The Uprising or Rising, as some call it, took place mostly in Dublin but was felt throughout Ireland. The point was to gain independence from Great Britain who had ruled Ireland for the past couple hundred years. At the turn of the 19th century England believed that Ireland had too much independence and made the Act of Union. “The result was the Act of Union of 1801: the Irish parliament voted itself out of existence and England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales were formally politically unified for the first time” (Hegarty 2). Around the time of the First World War, Ireland began

Yeats works drew heavily on Irish mythology and history, he never fully embraced his Protestant past nor joined the majority or Ireland Roman Catholics but he devoted much of his life to the study in myriad other subjects. The Irish writer’s James O’ Grady and Sir William Ferguson were the most influential. Through his writing Yeats found his voice to speak up against the harsh nationalist policies of the time, his early dramatic works conveyed his respect for Irish legend and fascination with occult. Yeats mother was the first introduce him and his sisters to the Irish folktales he grew to love so much but little did you know that his brother jack and father was also an accomplished artist and they both helped William in his writing and it's the reason he found his own interest in the wonderful arts as he called them. In 1894 Yeats met friend and patron Lady Augusta Gregory and thus began their involvement with The Irish Literary Theatre which was founded in 1899 in Dublin. Along with literature, he also loved the theater and wrote several plays. He collaborated with the likes of Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn and George Moore to establish the Irish Literary Theatre for the purpose of performing Irish and Celtic plays. As a dramatist, his successful works included ‘The Countess Cathleen’ (1892), ‘The Land of Heart’s Desire’ (1894) and ‘The King’s Threshold’

After the Norman invasion of 1169, Eastern Ireland became a kingdom under the British crown,

Irish independence has been fought for a long time ever since the British occupied Ireland in 1172. The King of England invaded and controlled Ireland. The invasion led to religious and territorial conflicts. There was an effort to create a church comparable to the Church of England in the 1500s. Catholics who live in Ireland were against the idea and a conflict for independence has emerged (Arena & Arrigo, 2004). The suppression of Irish nationalism by the British in the 20th century led to the creation of martyrs for the cause led by the Irish Republican Army (Combs, 2011).

Yeats was a confessional poet - that is to say, that he wrote his poetry directly from his own experiences. He was an idealist, with a purpose. This was to create Art for his own people - the Irish. But in so doing, he experienced considerable frustration and disillusionment. The tension between this ideal, and the reality is the basis of much of his writing. One central theme of his earlier poetry is the contrast

The effects of war as a theme in W.B.Yeats’s Easter 1916 and An Irish Airman Foresees His Death

of his poems he tries to show the reader that if they had seen what he

The twenty-four old romantic poet John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn” written in the spring of 1819 was one of his last of six odes. That he ever wrote for he died of tuberculosis a year later. Although, his time as a poet was short he was an essential part of The Romantic period (1789-1832). His groundbreaking poetry created a paradigm shift in the way poetry was composed and comprehended. Indeed, the Romantic period provided a shift from reason to belief in the senses and intuition. “Keats’s poem is able to address some of the most common assumptions and valorizations in the study of Romantic poetry, such as the opposition between “organic culture” and the alienation of modernity”. (O’Rourke, 53) The irony of Keats’s Urn is he likens

William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet, a dramatist, and a prose writer - one of the greatest English-language poets of the twentieth century. (Yeats 1) His early poetry and drama acquired ideas from Irish fable and arcane study. (Eiermann 1) Yeats used the themes of nationalism, freedom from oppression, social division, and unity when writing about his country. Yeats, an Irish nationalist, used the three poems, “To Ireland in the Coming Times,” “September 1913” and “Easter 1916” which revealed an expression of his feelings about the War of Irish Independence through theme, mood and figurative language.

​Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York, England on February 21, 1907. He was educated at Christ Church, Oxford after his family moved to Birmingham in his early childhood. He later attended Oxford University where his gift as a poet was immediately recognized. In 1930, at the age of twenty three, Auden's second collection of poetry aptly titled, Poems, was published, thus establishing him as a leading voice of a new generation (“W.H. Auden”).

W.B. Yeat’s poem, Easter 1916, details the speaker’s feelings of Nationalism and heartache as he remembers those that he lost in the Easter Rising. As the speaker reflects on the time before the rising, he remembers not only how his life has changed but also how his friends and companions had transformed both in their character and in their state of being. The speaker uses metaphors to visualize the unchanging goal of Irish freedom and the coming of nights that bring about death and heartache. In this analysis, I will be focusing on the first and last stanzas of the poem. By comparing these two stanzas I will reflect on the literary devices used, as well as the differences of the speaker’s visuals from the beginning and end. Overall, the speaker