Yeats Critics Flashcards
Anthony L Johnson, Byzantium
‘Yeats was fascinated by- and wished to believe in- reincarnation and life after death’
Thomas Parkinson, In memory…
‘the half-rhymes of ‘recall-gazelle’ merely fortifies the imperfection of life so far presented… What was so sweetly and spontaneously present has become soiled and darkened by the irrelevancies of life’. Half-rhymes make ‘muted sadness’
G.S Fraser, Byzantium
Byzantium is about ‘ a symbol of the permanence of art, even after the artists is dead, set against the mutability of life’
Bove, Byzantium
‘the persona has, throughout the poem, been ‘caught’ in the temporal world’
David A Ross, Stolen Child
‘Yeats feels powerfully drawn to the transcendental, but at this stage in his development, at least, he hesitates to untether himself’
R. Ellmann, Man and echo & Broken Dreams
‘he is perpetually evaluating… Turning all he has said and done into a question until he stays awake night after night’
Harold Bloom, Man and echo
‘the man and echo is a poem of total self-revelation’
RP Blackmur, The second coming
‘the Christian era, being nearly two thousand years old, is due for extinction and replacement, in short the second coming, which this poem heralds’
CK Stead, Easter 1916
‘thus the movement of the poem- from the temporal to the timeless-… Makes the poem a forerunner for the more famous ‘sailing to Byzantium’’
‘the men of the poems are all dead- no longer men at all but symbols that take life in the mind’
Yvor Winters, Leda and the swan
The quote ‘brute blood of the air’ shows that Zeus ‘may be thought of as living in, and descending from, the air’ to perform brutish acts, not dissimilar to Satan, the prince of air
Richard Ellmann, WSAC
‘an old bachelor… He filled many of his poems with laments of his lost youth’
Edward Larissy
‘[Yeats had] the sense that he had become too passive and otherworldly’
Donald Stauffer, WSAC
Although the swans at Coole sometimes soothe Yeats, they also make him unhappy
