What elements of modernity do you find
in Yeats’ poems? Discuss with reference to the poems in your syllabus./ Discuss
Yeats as a modern poet.
Yeats has been considered as the greatest of modern poets.
He has had a long poetic career, starting
to write poetry quite early in his life. He has a wide range of interests
beginning with romanticism, Celtic myths and legends, philosophy and realism.
His first love was an escape from the sordid realities. He
took refuse in a dreamy world, full beauty and romance. He showed no interest
in the political problems or social realities of his time. He had been very
much under the spell of romance. “Ancient things and the stuff of dreams”---
these words give the keynote of Yeats’ entire poetic outlook in the early years
of his poetic career. He was more at home in dreams than actualities; more at ease
in the world of symbols than in the stern realities of life; more in company
with beauty and nature than with the
sordid and ugly things of life. It was at this stage that Yeats felt shocked by
ugly things and wrote, “The wrong unshapely thing is a wrong too great to be
told”.
Yeats’ tendency to run away from the shabby realities of
life, and also from pain and suffering in life, comes out clearly in ‘The Stolen
Child’. Such poems are instinct with his romantic impulse. But his honeymoon
with romanticism came to an end in beginning of the 20th century.
The first signs of change in Yeats are seen in 1904 in his collection of poems
entitled, “In the Seven Woods’. Here the poet shows his awareness of the outer world.
From this time onwards, he feels that poetry should be free from unnecessary
and romantic decorations and from vagueness.
