William Butler Yeats is a Modern Poet

The following essay is on Yeats as a modern poet. I have tried my best to illustrate how Yeats can be referred as a true Modern Poet. In form and content, W.B Yeats is a true example of an Modern Poet. Have a look how I have proceeded. 

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William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) is regarded as not only the most important Irish poet, but also as one of the most important poets of Modern age. His poems have been seen as the examples of modern literature. In his poems, we find astounding variety, political note, realism, religion, mysticism and so on. And all these matters have made him a true modern poet. However, his greatest period is generally said to have begun with the publication of The Wild Swans at Coole in 1919, and by the end of his career he was ranked along with Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, as a foremost modernist poet. (Intro by Ian Mackean)

Like many of the canonical Modernist writers, the work of W.B. Yeats represents the paradox of a longing for the past and a vision for the future, (Bradbury and McFarlane, 1991; Cantor, 1988). Whether it be the revision of America's political past, in the form of Ezra Pound's "John Adams Cantos" (Pound, 1986) or T.S. Eliot's revisiting of a Christian theological past in the form of his Ariel poems (Eliot, 1989) Modernism constantly sought to find a future from the traditional past, as Hugh Kenner says of Eliot: "these poems exhaust tradition, or as much of the tradition as lay within the compass of their author's purpose." (Kenner, 1969: 210)

Politics and contemporary life are also the concerned matters for modernist poets. And Irish politics was a theme to which Yeats frequently returned, particularly in the middle phase of his career, but he was responding as an individual to the turmoil and violence which was on the one hand tearing his country apart, and on the other hand setting it free. In his poem ‘Easter 1916’ his concern is to commemorate the individuals who suffered and died in the struggle to bring about what he calls 'A terrible beauty', and in his Nobel lecture he drew attention to the 'monstrous savagery' perpetrated on both sides of the conflict.

As Malcolm Bradbury assert in his Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890-1930 (Bradbury ad McFarlane, 1991), Modernism has always represented the symbiosis of aesthetic and socio-political ideals: "One of the word's (Modernism) associations is with the coming of a new era if high aesthetic self-consciousness and non-representationism, in which art turns from realism and humanistic representation towards style, technique and spatial form in pursuit of a deeper penetration of life." (Bradbury, 1991: 25)

In the early work of Yeats this took the form of a deliberate evocation of Irish mythology. In such poems as "Red Hanrahan's Song about Ireland" (Yeats, 1987: 90) and those in the volume The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1987: 99-109), the poet evokes an Ireland unified by a shared past, a land that finds homogeneity through appreciation of its environment. The fairy stories and folk tales that form the basic imagistic lexicon of, for instance, "A Faery Song"

"We who are old, old and gay, O so old! Thousands of years, thousands of years, If I were told." (Yeats, 1987: 43)

Connects Yeats with Ireland's bardic past, as Morton Irving-Seidin states in his book William Butler Yeats: The Poet as Mythmaker 1865-1939 (1962):"The literary traditional of Gaelic Ireland falls into two main currents, of which the first includes the bardic stories of the Red Branch Tribe of Ulster and the Fenians of Connacht and their successors." (Seidin, 1962: 6)

This is myth making and myth reinvention on a national scale; not only through his poetry but through his many dramas for the Abbey theatre, Yeats attempted to concretize an Irish aesthetic by reinterpreting and reinventing the tales and stories of Ireland's past; a semi-mythological psycho-temporal space that remained unsullied by the current and recurring political issues.

In poems like "Sailing to Byzantium" (Yeats, 1987: 217) we see this aesthetic vision devoid of the mythologized Ireland, the images and poetic allusions in this poem once again both evoke and create an artistic past, but this time it is a aristocratic past; a history, not of the folk tale, but of the landed, leisured, vibrant aesthetic; not of the bard anymore but the "drowsy Emperor" (Yeats, 1987: 218): "Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing, But such as Grecian Goldsmith's make Of hammered gold and gold enalling. To lords and ladies of Byzantium Of what is past, or passing, or to come." (Yeats, 1987: 218)


W. B Yeats’ poem The Second Coming has been seen as an example of modern zeitgeist literature (Hone,1962, Brandbury, Tratner,1995) at once depicting the de-centering and internal fissure of twentieth century culture and elegising the parting of a classical psychological period.

Yeats portrays that though war has been ended, it's effects are continuously affecting the people of modern age. He says that there remains insecurity and disorder everywhere. Yeats feels gloomy and fears of a stormy future. He knows that the world is full of disorder and there "Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world "

W. H. Auden in his Ken You Review essay, 1948 entitled "Yeats as an example", notes that Yeats accepted the modern necessity of having to make a lonely and deliberate choice of the principles and presumptions in terms of which(made) sense of his experience". Auden assigned Yeats the high praise of having written some of the most beautiful poetry" of modern times. 

W B Yeats biography by Nobel Prize org.  

More info about Yeats 

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