Yeats

Yeats

"A poet always writes of his personal life" A person is merely a product of the environment in which they are brought up. This is the strongest influence a person can experience and it shapes them throughout their life. Yeats lived in one of the most turbulent periods in Irish history. The events going on around him shaped Yeats as a man as well as a poet. Yeats had an acute sense of his Irish heritage and found great inspiration in Irish mythology and the supernatural whilst also questioning the validity of the actions on the part of Irish in regards to the English and their continuing conflict. These influences are apparent in the poems The Song of Wandering Aengus, Sixteen Dead Men, Easter 1916, The Tower and Sailing to Byzantium which reflect the influences of the mystical as well as the conflict Yeats experiences around him right the way through his life.

One of the clearest ways in which evidence of personal experiences can be prominent in the works of W.B. Yeats is when a comparison is made between the changes in his life with the evolution of his poetry. In his early works you can easily detect a difference in expression to that of his later and perhaps more well known works. In the early part of his career Yeats became involved in the Celtic Revival and was particularly interested in Celtic myths and legends and the theme featured highly through his work. An example of this influence can be found in his poem The Song of Wandering Aengus. This poem tells of Angus, known in Celtic legend as the God of Love, and his search for Caer Ibormeith, the maiden with whom he is in love. Yeats uses the Celtic legend as inspiration for his poem but translates it to his own interpretation. Yeats, in all his youthful naivety, writes of the mystical and imaginary and at this point seems relatively unaffected by the harsh truths of reality in Ireland.

These early works also present the reader with a very innocent and romantic picture. The Song of Wandering Aengus portrays romantic ideals which do not reflect the reality of life. The last stanza in particular speaks of many romantic notions such as walking "among long dappled grass" and picking "The silver apples of the moon, The golden apples of the sun". Yeats use of words such as "silver" and "dappled" help to give the poem a mystical light and show his romantic sensibilities of the time. This poem also shows the influence of the supernatural as the maiden "faded through the brightening air". This romantic ideology may also be attributed not only to his youth but also to the influence of Maud Gonne with whom he fell passionately in love and she became "a powerful figure in his poetry" . Yeats proposed to Maud Gonne several times but was always rejected. The last stanza of the poem represents an idealistic view of how love should be, especially in the case ...