REVISION SHEET – WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
Dialectical Poet
• Dialectical poetry follows a particular structure from the
thesis, to the antithesis to the synthesis.
• Oppositions are held in balance and transcended. Poems are
about change.
• Commonly uses symbols that represent opposite extremes.
• “Contradiction, balance and contrast is central to Yeats’
imagery.”
• Antinomy is common to Yeats’ poems
• Yeats’ poetic dialectics are the big ideas: the spiritual
illumination, historic insight, symmetry of life and so on.
Is Intertextual
• Drew upon antiquity, mythology, mysticism, nature, politics,
history, autobiography for inspiration.
• Articulates the multiple and paradoxical sides to Yeats’
personality and ways of thinking
• We see Yeats as poet: philosopher; lover; politician; symbolist,
young Yeats / old Yeats; Yeats the Romantic; Yeats the
Modernist; Yeats the dogmatic, ego; public figure versus
private man
• Consider the thesis statement: The poetry of W, B. Yeats
explores the universal dichotomies of human experience and
the tensions that exist between antithetical human realities.
•
Highly Symbolic
• Symbols are recurring in Yeats’ poetry
• Used symbols because they resonate with universal meaning
but also because they evoke a multiplicity of meaning.
• Uses symbols because of their pluralisitic meaning
• Uses symbols to explain the synthesis.
• The symbolism is the means by which oppositions are
transcended. Think of the “chestnut-tree”
• Analysis of imagery is imperative
Skilled Composer
• Yeats was an accomplished composer. He wrote poems with
technical precision. Their structure, rhythm and rhyme is
also a way he transcends oppositions. The structure itself
supplements and is an extension of the meaning of the
poem.
• It is in the poems craftsmanship that we can appreciate
Yeats’ talent and acceptance of the irreconcilability of life’s
paradoxes. In a linguistic and structural sense he is able to
transcend their confines.