![]() He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923.ĭiscover more of Yeats’s greatest poetry with The Major Works including poems, plays, and critical prose (Oxford World’s Classics). Yeats was in favour of Irish independence but, in poems such as ‘Easter 1916’ which respond to the Easter Rising, he reveals himself to be uneasy with the violent and drastic political and military methods adopted by many of his compatriots. She knew she could be of more use to him as a muse than as a wife or lover. Yeats asked her to marry him several times, but she always refused. Throughout much of his life, a woman named Maud Gonne was his muse. And yet, at the same time, there is a directness to his work which makes readers feel personally addressed, and situates his work always at one remove from more famous modernist poets (such as T. His late work, such as his 1927 poem ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, about growing old, show a thoughtful and contemplative poet whose imagery and references defy easy exegesis (what exactly does the ancient city of Byzantium represent in this poem?). As his career developed and literary innovations came with modernism in the early decades of the twentieth century, Yeats’s work retained its focus on traditional verse forms and rhyme schemes, but he became more political, more allusive, and more elliptical. His first collection, Crossways, appeared in 1889 when he was still in his mid-twenties, and his early poetry bore the clear influence of Romanticism. ![]() William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) is one of the greatest of all Irish poets. For among other things, ‘Easter 1916’ is about the tension between change and permanence, steadfastness and flexibility – and nowhere is this seen more clearly, perhaps, than in Yeats’s use of the stone in the third and fourth stanzas of ‘Easter 1916’. ‘A terrible beauty is born’: the words that end three of the four long stanzas that make up ‘Easter 1916’, with each new repetition of them changing them slightly.
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