 A brief overview of the influences upon Yeats’s poetry his inclinations, poetic beliefs and the

understanding of literature:

Explanation:

 his earliest poetry drew on folklore and the collective Irish folk imagination which contains
spiritual images2 , his work soon progressed to primarily incorporating the latter, using these
images and symbols in his exploration of the mystical qualities which art can hold for both the
artist and the audience.
 Long-standing criticisms that dismissed his earlier works as “youthful”, “mystical” and “escapist”
are now being refuted, with critics and scholars of the past two decades realizing the extent of
the influence that Yeats’s early aesthetic had on his mature, aesthetically cohesive works
 Yeats never lost his reverence for the Irish folk tradition, which contained the imaginative
history of the Irish culture, and recognized the role it played in his aesthetic development
throughout his career.
 Yeats is widely recognized as one of the twentieth century’s authors who emphasized the
intrinsic aesthetic value that literature has as an art form which possesses formal and thematic
beauty while also being integral to the development of a nation’s cultural sphere
 The early works (written between the 1880s and 1910s) that lie at the root of his poetic and
aesthetic development form part of the Romantic poetic tradition of Blake and Shelley, both
being poets whom Yeats greatly admired from a young age. Blake in particular inspired Yeats to
pursue his interest in the Irish folk tradition and the autonomous value of art.

 Yeats actively engaged with the metaphysical realm by interacting with the symbols he found in
folk art, and this engagement served as a precursor to his later focus on occult and magical
symbolism.

 While he shared Blake’s theoretical concerns regarding art, his works are set apart from Blake’s
by the very Rashness of his subject matter in which he rooted his Romantic ideas regarding the
role of the poet and his poetry.

 He continued to adhere to the Romantic principles of self-exploration and expression, and

shared Blake’s, Arthur Symons’s and the French Symbolists’ reverence for the use of symbols —
rather than mere metaphors — to capture the spiritual beauty and truths found in the realm of
the collective cultural artistic consciousness that had been shaped by tradition throughout the
history of artistic expression.
 During the 1880s and 1890s Yeats ultimately shared Blake’s thoroughly Romantic ideal that art is
a manifestation of truth which is best expressed through symbols if any attempt is to be made
at, in Blake an terms, “showing forth the secret things of God” (Blackstone, 1949:419).

 The artist’s goal is thus ultimate self-expression and, through that, the discovery of truth. Yeats
admires this symbolic approach, realizing the possibility that new inspiration would arise from
engagement with memories and tradition based on the supernatural rather than the material
world.
  Yeats finds many of his inspirational symbols in the folk tradition of rural Ireland which has
seemingly remained “untouched by the materialism and scientific investigations resulting from
the Renaissance”, and “still maintained contact with the mystery and imagination that existed
before man fell slave to the external world”
 During the 1880s Yeats also becomes increasingly concerned with the growing nationalistic
cause of Ireland. Politicians, scholars and artists of the country made it their project to obtain
Home Rule for Ireland, which, at that time, was still part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain
and Ireland which had come into being under the Act of Union of 1800. Yeats saw the Irish folk
tradition as the strongest common denominator shared by the Irish population who had long
been politically divided over their loyalties to the Crown or to Irish independence. Yeats
incorporated this tradition into his poetic and dramatic works as a means to inspire unity and a
cultural nationalistic spirit.

 Yeats maintains throughout this period of his career that what he wants to inspire with his
writing is a cultural and spiritual revolution rather than an overtly political one. Yeats wants his
“belief in nationality”, one of his “three interests”, to create, along with “a form of literature”
and “a form of philosophy”, a “discrete expression of a single conviction” (Yeats, 1994a:34).

 He disagrees with individuals who hold that “literature must be the expression of conviction and
be the garment of noble truth and not an end in itself” and argues that such opinions are based
on an “utter indifference to art, the direst carelessness, the most dreadful intermixture of the
commonplace” (Yeats, 2000:259).

 Art for Yeats has truth and beauty that represent the collective consciousness of a nation. This
cultural rather than political element of his nationalistic project can be attributed to his views on
the aesthetic value of art.

 Yeats holds that art which only aims to serve political or moral ends often compromises its
aesthetic integrity and he chooses to distance himself from such art, instead promoting an
aesthetic ideal which values art for its inherent ability to communicate with an audience
through the traditional symbols it encompasses. The artist is placed in the role of the bard and
functions as the mediator who exposes the ancient truths that have been embedded in symbols
through their traditional use.

 The poet must be able to create freely and without the pressure of serving a practical cause if
he is to be successful in his cultural duty, and this too demands art to be valued autonomously
as a force that has the potential to culturally invigorate a disenfranchised colonial Ireland.’

Works

1889 Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

1921 A Prayer for my Daughter
1889 The Stolen Child
1920 The Second Coming
1921 Easter, 1916
1928 The Tower
1970 Youth and Age
1890 The Lake Isle of Innisfree
1893 Who goes with Fergus?
1970 The Road at My Door
1917 The Wild Swans at Coole
1970 My Descendants
1904 Never give all the heart
1914 The Magi
1970 My Table
1916 The Young Man's Song
1919 The Balloon of the Mind
1899 The Moods
1919 An Irish Airman Foresees His Death
1919 The Living Beauty
1892 The Rose of Battle
1893 The Sorrow of Love
1899 Aedh Tells of the Perfect Beauty