Yeats Speech Assessment – Jack El Khoury In his poetry Yeats combines a commitment to Irish themes

The subject matter of the poem is violent and disturbing. Also, the sonnet is brief, thus, ensuring the rape will be brief as well. The organization of the poem shows the progress of the rape.  The first quatrain presents the assault-how the swan literally drops onto Leda, how he's caressing her thighs, and how he's holding her helplessly underneath him.  The second quatrain reflects her emotions-how terrified she was, what should she do, should she try to push him off of her?  The third stanza presents the ejaculation scene ("a shudder in the loins engenders...") Finally, the fourth stanza asks the question of whether or not Leda had the knowledge that it was Zeus in disguise and whether or not Leda knew what the intensity of what just happened- how Helen's beauty will cause the Trojan war and how Helen will launch the war of a thousand ships.  To show the intensity of what is being portrayed in the poem, one of the devices that Yeats used was the alliteration "brute blood" as part of the poem.

On Easter Monday, April 24, 1916, members of the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army occupied Dublin’s General Post Office, and from its steps, Patrick Pearse read a proclamation of the Irish Republic. The British military responded with force, and the Easter Rising, as it became known, came to an end with the rebels’ surrender on April 29. In England at the time, W. B. Yeats learned about the Rising mostly through newspapers and through letters from his friend and patroness, Lady Gregory. As the British forces imposed martial law and, in early May, executed fifteen of the Rising’s leaders, some of whom Yeats knew personally, the events in Ireland moved Yeats to begin writing the poem which became “Easter, 1916.”

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

William Butler Yeats is one of Ireland’s best known poets, writing twelve books of poetry in his lifetime in addition to numerous other works. His poetry often utilizes place and landscape – specifically the natural landscape of Ireland – to interpret the social and cultural landscape of the country. Some of his works, such as The Lake Isle of Innisfree or The Stolen Child, relay peaceful and serene depictions of landscape whereas poems such as Thoughts Upon The Present State Of The World, use landscapes in a more aggressive way to describe the harsh social climate of Ireland at the time. Yeats sought to revive the beauty of Irish landscape and culture, and became a national poet and a voice of Ireland in doing so. His use of

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.

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’

Yeats often took pride in his Irish roots unlike many, and let those same roots drive his life as much as he let them drive the content of his works from his remarkable poetic compositions to his breath taking stage productions. “The poetry of W.B. Yeats has to be reckoned with as a force which was both influenced by and deeply influenced the crystallization of the Irish ethnicity and identity” (“W.B. Yeats Poetry: Crystallizing..”). As much influence his identity played on his poetry his poetic expression of if affected the crystallization of the identity itself. Over the course of his works and of his life Yeats very much had his own impact on what the Irish identity was in itself. Extraordinarily dropping the preconceived notions of what it meant to be Irish , to speak Gallic, to be catholic, or protestant, Yeats surpassed the ideal and lived the reality accepting all that came along with being Irish: the good, the bad, and the ugly of its religion, its truth, and its history. Yeats led all this by example through his work for Ireland and its cause of independence in his life and through his written works beyond his death. “Yeats became involved with the Celtic Revival, a movement against the cultural influences of English rule in Ireland during the Victorian period, which sought to

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

Within the last four lines of “Easter 1916”, William Butler Yeats concludes the first stanza with a sombre and melancholic tone which portrays a theme of political change. In this poem, Yeats demonstrates his personal opinion on the Easter Rising. The placement of the lines contrasts with the previous lines as it introduces a new theme of change as contradictory to the mood set in the beginning. The significance of the lines is how it changes the initial rhyme scheme of ABAB, which emphasizes phrases, interrupting the flow of the poem. This can be interpreted as a turning point for the poem since it introduces a motif of the Easter Rising. Yeats’ point of view is based on his personal beliefs and influences how the poem is written throughout.

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 born on June 13, 1865, in Dublin, Irelandtheson of a well-known Irish painter, John Butler Yeatsand died in January 28, 1939, Menton,France. Yeats was deeply complex in politics in Ireland, and in the twenties, notwithstanding Irish independence from England. William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and one of the important figures of 20th century’s literature considering one of the greatestpoets of a century. W.B Yeats’ poems The Easter1916written in 1916 andan Irish Airman foresees His Deathwritten in 1918and published in 1919, exposes two different groups of people who went to wars during First World War in reflective narrative form. Those

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

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