Some would argue that the Irishman William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) was the greatest English-speaking poet since the death of Wordsworth in 1850. Others are of the view that he was too self-consciously histrionic – too much of a poseur – to be rated that highly. However we judge him, though, it cannot be disputed that, in a period of roughly half a century, Yeats produced poem after poem, day by day and week by week, all of them intensely musical, skilfully constructed and varied in subject and theme. Scarcely a year passed in Yeats’s adult life when he did not produce a substantial lyric with some claim to immortality.
It will be the aim of this course to read closely, analyse and discuss in detail a small selection of these great lyrics: ‘The Stolen Child’, ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’, ‘Easter 1916’ ‘The Second Coming’, ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, ‘Among School Children’ and so on. We shall inevitably touch on the context of Yeats’s work – on Irish history, on the great crises of the early 20th century, on the development of literary modernism, and on his own complex and eventful life – but the main purpose of the course will be to discuss events of language, the verbal constructs printed on the page. Each class will begin with the poems of the day being read aloud, so that we are all able to absorb and appreciate the heady richness of Yeats’s music. That first sensuous experience of the poet’s words will then be followed by class discussion of those words and their possible meanings. We shall also ask ourselves whether the poet who was still writing in 1939 can be thought of as the same person as the one who emerged from the Celtic twilight of the late Victorian age.
The course will inevitably be a kind of introduction to Yeats, but it will introduce him through the poems he made and not through explanations.
