英美文学选读学习笔记 William Butler Yeats

W. B. Yeats (1865-1939) was born into an Anglo-Irish Protestant family in Dublin. His childhood was largely spent between school in London and his mother's native county of Sligo, where old Irish way of life and folklore were still very strong. After high school, Yeats entered the School of Art in Dublin where he met many artists and writers who encouraged him to be a poet. With a strong passion for Celtic legends, he read Irish poetry and the Gaelic sagas in translation. His youth was spent during the high tide of the Irish Nationalist Movement led by Parnell. Yeats met Lady Gregory and John Synge in 1896. With the common cultural ideals of reviving the Irish literature, they organized the Irish National Dramatic Society and opened the Abbey Theater in 1904. Yeats served as its director and wrote more than 20 plays for the theater. In 1923, he was awarded Nobel Prize for literature.

Toward the Irish Nationalist Movement, Yeats's attitude went through several different stages. When he was young, he took an active interest in nationalist politics. Later, when his love affair with Maud Gonne, a beautiful Irish actress and a fiery freedom fighter, turned out to be fruitless and when his plays were denounced by the Dublin middle class as being anti-religious, and therefore anti-Irish, he was apparently disillusioned with the state of the Irish Nationalist Movement and turned to praise the refinement of the aristocratic life. But when he heard the Easter Rising of 1916, Yeats was again inspired. Fairly speaking, Yeats was a moderate nationalist. Surely he had his national pride and his hatred for English opssion. But Yeats never showed any enthusiasm towards the violent, heroic mass actions taken by the people for their national cause.

Not content with any dogma in any of the established religious institutions, Yeats built up for himself a mystical system of beliefs. In choosing the mystical belief of cyclical history over the modern conception of progress, Yeats owed a great deal to the Italian philosopher Vico and the German philosopher Nietzsche. He believed that history, and life, followed a circular, spiral pattern consisting of long cycles which repeated themselves over and over on different levels.  And symbols like "winding stairs," "spinning tops," "gyres" and "spirals" were part of his elaborate theory of history, which had obviously become the central core of order in his great poems. Yeats later disagreed with the idea of "art for art's sake." He came to see that literature should not be an end in itself but the exssion of conviction and the garment of noble emotion. To write about Ireland for an Irish audience and to recreate a specifically Irish literature -- these were the aims that Yeats was fighting for as a poet and a playwright. Starting from his twenties, he had been active in promoting the movement known as the Irish Literary Revival. He  believed that the Irish art, poetry, drama, and legend would fill the people with national aspirations in striving for a new Ireland, and that only by "exssing primary truths in ways appropriate to this country" could artists hope to restore to the modern Ireland the "unity of culture" that was needed to bring an end to his country's internal spanision and suffering.

Yeats is considered to be one of the greatest poets in the English language, and his poetic achievement stands at the center of modern literature. He had a very long poetic career, stretching from the 1880s to the 1930s, and had experienced a slow and painful change in his poetic creation, starting in the romantic tradition and finishing as a matured modernist poet. Generally, his poetic career can be spanided into three periods according to the contents and style of his poetry.

As a young man in the last decades of the 19th century, Yeats began his poetic career in the romantic tradition. The major themes are usually Celtic legends, local folktales, or stories of the heroic age in Irish history. Many of his early poems have a dreamy quality, exssing melancholy, passive and self-indulgent feelings. But in a number of poems, Yeats has achieved suggestive patterns of meaning by a careful counterpointing of contrasting ideas or images like human and fairy, natural and artificial, domestic and wild, and ephemeral and permanent. "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" is just a popular resentative of such poems; around a "fairyland" background, the poem is closely woven, easy, subtle and musical; the clarity and control of the imagery give the poem a haunting quality. In "The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland," Yeats has made something peculiarly effective out of the contrast between human activities and the strangeness of nature. The overall style of his early poetry is very delicate with natural imagery, dream-like atmosphere and musical beauty.

The first two decades of the 20th century were a period of transition to Yeats, during which his attitude towards politics, life and poetry had experienced a great change. His disgust at the bourgeois philistinism soured his political optimism, leaving him a disillusioned patriotic sentiment. His long-cherished but hopeless love for Gonne brought him only suffering and bitterness. Gradually, Yeats turned from the traditional poetry to a modernist one. Ideologically, he responded to Nietzsche's works with great excitement; artistically, he came under the influence of French Symbolism and John Donne's metaphysical poetry; and poetically, he accepted the modernist ideas in poetry writing advocated by Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot.

Now Yeats began to write with realistic and concrete themes on a variety of subjects, exploring the profound and complicated human problems, such as life, love, politics, and religion. With the combination of his apciation of beauty and a sense of tragedy in life, Yeats gave a significance to the ordinary events of life in his poetry. The new vigor of his verse is reflected in the cise and concrete imagery, the strong passion, and the active verb forms. The early passive and dreamy mood was replaced by anger, disillusion and bitter satire. His style is both simple and rich, colloquial and formal, with a quality of metaphysical wit and symbolic vision, which indicates that Yeats has already been on his way to modernist poetry. In his poem, "No Second Troy," Yeats exssed a strong feeling towards love and towards the Irish reality with scornful irony. In the poem, "September 1913," Yeats, with severe satire, assaulted the bourgeois philistines and their meanness of spirit and selfish materialism.

Yeats reached the last stage of his poetic creation when he was over fifty. The scorn so pervasive before was gone; but the loss of youth and the waste of life made him feel more bitter and more disillusioned. He yearned to move away from the sensual world of growth and change, and to enter the timeless, eternal world of art and intellect. Yeats came to realize that eternal beauty could only live in the realm of art. His concern has turned to the great subjects of dichotomy, such as, youth and age, love and war, vigor and wisdom, body and soul, and life and art. And this dichotomy has brought constant tensions in his works and revealed the human dicament. In this last period, Yeats has developed a tough, complex and symbolical style.

In his famous poem, "Sailing to Byzantium," Yeats explored the problems of death, love, old age and art. Being at the junction of East and West, the city became a refuge from time, and, at once, purgatory and paradise, a haunt of spirit, symbolizing the unity of the opposites. "Once out of nature," or dead, the old man in "Sailing to Byzantium" will be gone into the "Monuments of unaging intellect," the "artifice of eternity," where art arrests change. His great works of art, which are needed now to carry him beyond the sensual world, to transform him into a golden bird, would sing of time, "Of what is past, or passing, or to come." "Leda and the Swan," his strange but powerful sonnet, exsses a tragic sense of history as a series of patterns of behavior and action. Leda, the beautiful Queen of Sparta, was raped by Zeus in the form of swan. Consequently Leda gave birth to two eggs, from one of which Helen was born. Helen, who was seduced by Paris, was the cause of the Trojan War. And this war caused the birth of Rome, which in its turn laid the foundation of modern Europe, and so on. Here Yeats tries to say that Love and War, resulting from this act and symbolized by Helen, are the two primary passions of human beings and that they have caused bitter struggles and endless sufferings.

Yeats is also a dramatist, writing verse plays in most of the cases. He wrote more than 20 plays in a stretch of 48 years. Yeats has a deep and real feeling for the Irish tradition. The stories of his early plays all came from the Irish myth or legends. In 1892, Yeats wrote his first play, The Countess Cathleen to imss Maud Gonne. The play is an Irish myth about a noblewoman who sells her soul to the devil in order to save starving peasants; and Yeats considered it as an appropriate symbol of the activities to which Gonne had dedicated her life. Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902), written largely in prose, is a forceful play of patriotism, in which Cathleen, a poor and mysterious old woman, who symbolizes Ireland, calls on the young people to assist her in recovering her land from strangers and promises glory to those who make sacrifice in their fight. The play was a great inspiration to the Irish nationalists who were fighting against the English government for their own freedom and independence- In addition to the above-mentioned, The Land of Heart's Desire (1894), The Shadowy Waters (1900) and Purgatory (1935) are also regarded as fairly good plays by Yeats.

In his later phase of dramatic career, in order to reflect "the deeps of the mind," Yeats began experimenting with techniques borrowed from the Japanese Nōh plays, such as the use of masks, of ritualized actions, and of symbolic languages together with the combination of music and dance. In a certain way, his experiments anticipated the abstract movement of modern theater.

However, even in his plays Yeats has remained a lyrical poet. His plays are enjoyed more for the beauty of their language than for dramatic situations. As a matter of fact, his dramas are far less "dramatic" in force and in tension than his poetic works. Yeats is, first of all, remembered as a great poet.