Poetcrit
Current Volume: 37 (2024 )
ISSN: 0970-2830
Periodicity: Half-Yearly
Month(s) of Publication: January & July
Subject: Language & Literature
DOI: https://doi.org/10.32381/POET
Online Access is Free for all Life Members of Poetcrit
Modernism in Yeats’ Poetry
By : Sushil Kumar Mishra
Page No: 80-84
Abstract
William Butler Yeats has been regarded as one of the extraordinary modern poets. He inspired and influenced his contemporaries as well as successors, such as T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and W.B. Auden. Yeats started his long literary career as a romantic poet and gradually evolved into a modernist poet. There are three common themes, love, Irish Nationalism, and mysticism, in Yeats’ poetry, but modernism is the overriding theme. As a typical modern poet, he laments for the great devastation and destruction of the 1st World War and regrets for post-war modern world which is in disorder and chaotic situation. Yeats is anti-rationalist in his attitude which is expressed through his passion for occultism or mysticism. He is a renowned poet in modern times for his sense of morality and humanity. When W.B. Yeats is compared to his contemporary poet T. S. Eliot, Yeats is considered as the seed of modernism whereas T.S. Eliot is the tree of that seed. Eliot and Yeats have certain things in common. Both are intensely aware of man in history and of the soul in eternity.
Yeats is a modern Irish poet and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. He is a pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments. In his later years, he served as an Irish Senator for two terms. Yeats is a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival.
Author :
Sushil Kumar Mishra
Associate Professor and Head, Department of English, SRM University, Sonepat, Haryana.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.32381/POET.2019.32.01.12