W.B Yeats & Great War Poets Symbolism

“Is that a Symbol? Sure why not. It’s the next question that gets hairy: what does it mean, what does it stand for” (Foster 18)? In Thomas C. Foster’s “Is That a Symbol” this quote explores the idea that there is a larger aspect when it comes to a symbol’s meaning. The idea of symbolism isn’t solely a definition, rather it allows for each to be unique, whether that is the rivers in both Hart Crane’s, and T.S. Elliot’s poems, or the symbolic meaning of a white flag. Foster not only defines a symbol, but he goes in depth about how one interprets a symbol, which in the end promotes the idea of individuality.

Questions reader should ask when trying to determine symbolic meaning: “what’s the writer doing with this image, this object, this act; what possibilities are suggested by the movement of the narrative or the lyric; and most important, what does it feel like it’s doing?” (Foster 59).

The similarities between the poems lie in their abilities to utilize imagery as a means to enhance the concept of the fleeting nature that life ultimately has and to also help further elaborate the speaker’s opinion towards their own situation. In Keats’ poem, dark and imaginative images are used to help match with the speaker’s belief that both love and death arise from fate itself. Here, Keats describes the beauty and mystery of love with images of “shadows” and “huge cloudy symbols of a high romance” to illustrate his belief that love comes from fate, and that he is sad to miss out on such an opportunity when it comes time for his own death.

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.

¨I lay there crying, sheltering my fallen scarlet ibis from the heresy of rain.¨ (Hurst 323).

In the first stanza Yeats expresses his conflicting loathing and admiration for modernity through the juxtaposition of “vivid faces” and “grey houses”. This represents the possibilities that modernity can bring; the revitalising of the community or the destruction of tradition and age old energy already lost by the modifications in the city. The repetition of the phrase “A terrible beauty is born” in the first and fourth stanzas articulate this inner turmoil revolving around modernity. This oxymoronic declaration is emphasised throughout the text by Yeats’ confusion towards the rebellion and its necessity. The fourth stanza embodies this conflict, removing the previously represented idea that life in pre-rebellion Ireland was a “casual comedy”, alluding to an Elizabethan play where the characters were content. By asking the rhetoric questions “was it needless death” and “O when may [British rule] suffice?” Yeats parallels the unresolved contradiction of “terrible beauty”. However, this sensitive treatment of conflict allows the retainment of ambiguity and can be related to any change within life, hence allowing audiences to superimpose their own beliefs and ideas into the poem. Yeats continues to explore his aversion towards modernism in The Second Coming with the appointment of a new “gyre” standing as the symbol for a new age. The fear of

The use of figurative language such as symbolism and metaphors help poets to convey what they want to represent in the poem to the readers. This is very important because it can help readers relate to the poem more. A poet uses a metaphor when he wants to make a comparison between two things without using the words like or as. On the other hand, a symbol is when a word or a parts of a poem serves as a meaning or idea for the entire poem itself. In both the poems “Oranges” by Gary Soto and “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” by Wallace Stevens, both poets use many symbols to express what the poems mean to the readers and to themselves.

or facts. This process is used by a lot of the most popular authors and playwrights. It helps the author to describe or to better emphasize a particular thought or object in a story. It is used to give even the most simple of objects, like the “black box” which we would think as a small unimportant object, but in the short story “The Lottery” it was used to show fear and the time of the “lottery.” Symbolism is a way for authors to use objects and thoughts to show mystical ideas, the state of mind, and also the emotion of not only the characters but also the settings and even the emotion of the work as a whole. All three of these authors were able to portray symbolism in many ways which allowed a deeper understanding to each their pieces.

but says that in that case it is better that there will only be a

Yeats' poem "The Second Coming," written in 1919 and published in 1921 in his collection of poems Michael Robartes and the Dancer, taps into the concept of the gyre and depicts the approach of a new world order. The gyre is one of Yeats' favorite motifs, the idea that history occurs in cycles, specifically cycles "twenty centuries" in length (Yeats, "The Second Coming" ln. 19). In this poem, Yeats predicts that the Christian era will soon give way apocalyptically to an era ruled by a godlike desert beast with the body of a lion and the head of a man (ln. 14). Critics have argued about the exact meaning of this image, but a close reading of the poem, combined with some simple genetic work, shows

In William Butler Yeats poem “Leda and the Swan”, he uses the fourteen lines of the traditional sonnet form in a radical, modernist style. He calls up a series of unforgettable, bizarre images of an immediate physical event using abstract descriptions in brief language. Through structure and language Yeats is able to paint a powerful sexual image to his readers without directly giving the meaning of the poem.

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.

In the context of John Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale,” “The Wild Swans at Coole” by William Butler Yeats raises compelling dialogue with Keats’ piece, which suggests that Yeats, to some degree, draws inspiration from John Keats, in that his pose concerning the nightingale becomes a basis and “touchstone” for “The Wild Swans at Coole.” Aside from commonalities concerning avians, both poems share elements of Romanticism, melancholy, feelings of weariness, and other key ideas, images, and plots as “Ode to a Nightingale” and thus, “The Wild Swans at Coole” strengthens Keats’ initial ideas in a harmonic and resonant fashion using its own unique methods. As a response to Keatsian Romanticism, Yeats revises the ideas surrounding transcendence of

William Butler Yeats was a poet of the twentieth century, a time of change with world wars, revolutions, technology change, and much more. William Yeats is considered the most important poet of the twentieth century. “The Irish poet and dramatist William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) was perhaps the greatest poet of the 20th century. He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1923 and was the leader of the Irish Literary Renaissance”(Gale). Yeats started his career with plays, and eventually moved to poetry. Poetry gave him a loud voice to express what he wanted. One of his most remembered pieces of work is Sailing to Byzantium. In Yeats's Sailing to Byzantium three messages are displayed.