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The Yeats Journal of Korea/한국 예이츠 저널 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14354/yjk.2015.48.109
Vol. 48 (2015): 109-124
The Epic Elements in Yeats’s Poetry
Baekyun Yoo
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Abstract: One of the marked characteristic features of modernist poetry includes its
employment of the epic form, attesting to the fact that modernist poets made efforts
to revive the highest and lofty form of poetic writing. And scholars do not hesitate
to point to Ezra Pound’s The Cantos and T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland as an example
of modernist poems involving epic elements. My argument is that William Butler
Yeats also needs to be included among the modernist poets who try to incorporate
epic elements in his poems. Although Yeats did not write a poem which can be
comparable to The Cantos and The Wasteland, a close examination of many of his
poems leads us to see that they also retain some epic features, exemplifying the fact
that the poet also looked back to the tradition not only for poetic inspiration but
also for literary continuity.
Key words: Yeats, the epic elements, modernist poetry, modernism
Author: Baekyun Yoo teaches at Baekseok Culture University in S. Korea.
E-mail: [email protected]
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제목: 예이츠 시의 서사시의 요소
우리말 요약: 모던시의 특징 중의 하나는 서사 형태를 사용하고 있다는 점이다. 이는
모던시인들이 가장 높고 고귀한 형식의 시로 꼽는 서사시를 그들의 시대에 되살리려
했다는 사실을 입증한다. 그리고 학자들은 이 예로 에즈라 파운드의 캔토스와 티에
스 엘리엇의 황무지를 꼽는다. 나는 윌리엄 버틀러 예이츠도 이 모던시인의 그룹에
속해야 한다고 믿는다. 예이츠는 비록 캔토스나 황무지에 비견될만한 서사형태의
시를 쓰지는 않았지만 그가 쓴 많은 시들이 서사시의 요소를 갖고 있기 때문이다. 이
는 예이츠 역시 파운드나 엘리엇처럼 전통을 존중하고 그 전통에서 시적영감을 얻을
뿐만 아니라 시적 연속성을 지켜야 한다고 믿었기 때문이다.
주제어: 예이츠, 서사시의 요소, 모더니스트 시, 모더니즘
저자: 백석문화대학교 영어과 교수이다.
____________________________________
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A lthough
W. B. Yeats spent most of his mature poetic career in the early
twentieth century or the modern age, critics are still reluctant to place the Irish
poet along with Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot when they talk about the
characteristic features of modernist poetry. In his Cambridge Introduction to
Modernism, Pericles Lewis maintains that one of the most important
characteristics of modernist poetry is that it “contains both lyric and epic
elements,” contending that “Modernism continued the tendency, begun in
romanticism, to prize lyric highly, but many modernist poets also sought to
write in the traditionally highest form, epic” (145). And he takes Ezra Pound’s
the Cantos and T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland as an example of the modernist
poets’s efforts to revive the epic form of literature. According to Pericles
Lewis:
Ezra Pound’s epic, The Cantos, begun during the first world war but still
incomplete at his death in 1972, shares some of the features of T. S.
Eliot’s The Waste Land, but it shores its fragments on a much greater
scale. ... It makes use of quotation and allusion to other poets in a method
that somewhat resembles cubist collage, but at epic length. Pound combines
borrowings from Homer, the Provençal poet Arnaut Daniel, the history of
the Italian Renaissance, President John Adams, Robert Browning, and
Chinese poetry ... The result, though tainted by Pound’s anti-semitism and
adoration of Mussolini, is, like The Waste Land or Joyce’s Ulysses, a major
expression of the modernist ambition to bring the whole of world history to
bear on the understanding of modern life and the remaking of poetic
tradition. Pound called it an epic, “a poem including history,” ... (147)
Pericles Lewis goes on to explain the epic nature of The Wasteland which he
calls a miniature epic:
Eliot defined the lyric as “the voice of the poet talking to himself, or to
nobody,” and if we accept his description of The Waste Land as a “piece
of rhythmical grumbling,” it may seem to belong to the lyric tradition. Yet
The Epic Elements in Yeats’s Poetry
111
its broader ambitions are obvious. ... Pound defined an epic as a “poem
including history.” Although much shorter than Homer’s Iliad or Odyssey,
Virgil’s Aeneid, Dante’s Divine Comedy, or Milton’s Paradise Lost, The
—
Waste Land does contain history both contemporary history and the history
of the world understood in mythological terms. One of the factors that
helped to create “high modernism” was the attempt of poets, after the war,
to extend the techniques of the pre-war avant-gardes to address broad,
historical questions, the sorts of questions normally addressed by epic. (145)
Obviously, the two modernist poets’ attempt to revive the epic tradition can
be understood in the context of the modern age’s reaction against the
conventions and aesthetics of the Victorian age. The modern age, which
began at the turn of the twentieth century, saw a lot of cultural shocks due
to the industrial revolution, scientific developments, the emergency of
capitalism and the destructive forces of imperialism which contributed to the
breaking out of the world war one and two. Witnessing that the world was
plunging into an unknown territory, the modernist writers, artists and
intellectuals no longer believed in the Victorian cultural values marked by its
optimism in social stability, human growth and historical progress. One of the
things the modern writers did, reacting against the conventions and aesthetics
of the old world or the Victorian age, was to turn to the past and the great
spiritual tradition of mankind for their inspiration. In his essay “Tradition and
the Individual Talent” (1919), T. S. Eliot expressed why the modern writer
needed to dig into the past:
No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His
significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead
poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for
contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of
æsthetic, not merely historical, criticism. ... Whoever has approved this idea
of order, of the form of European, of English literature, will not find it
preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the
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present is directed by the past. (37)
Here, Eliot emphasizes that the modernists need to interact with the art of the
past. In this way, the tradition shapes a modern art; a modern art enables us
see a new form of tradition.
In a similar vein, Ezra Pound also emphasized the importance of reviving
and remaking the traditions. In Cantos LIII, Ezra Pound commemorated the
Chinese emperor Tching Tang, founder of the Shang Dynasty in the
eighteenth century, who in Pound’s account “wrote MAKE IT NEW / on his
bath tub / Day by day make it new.” And Pound made the phrase famous by
publishing an essay titled “Make It New” in 1935. Although Pound did not
specify what it in “Make It New” really meant, critics generally agree that
—
“It” is the Old what is valuable in the culture of the past. It was because
Pound firmly believed that, as he wrote in “The Tradition,” “The tradition is
a beauty which we preserve and not a set of fetters to bind us.”(91) Through
his poetry, he was trying to breathe life into the artistic and intellectual
accomplishments of the past by using them in his own poetry in the form of
translation, imitation, allusion and quotation. It was in these historical and
critical contexts that we can understand one of the most important missions
of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound: to revive the epic form of literature which
has been extinct during the Victorian period.
My belief is that William Butler Yeats also needs to be included among
the modernist poets who try to breathe new life into the epic form of poetry.
Like T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, William Butler Yeats, another shaping
forces of modern literature and one of the most influential poets in the
twentieth century, also turned to the past for his spiritual and poetic
inspiration. By participating in the activities of the Golden Dawn and making
himself immerse in the Gaelic and Hindu traditions, Yeats attempted not only
to learn the esoteric wisdom of ancient gurus but also incorporated those
The Epic Elements in Yeats’s Poetry
113
elements and values in his poems which he believed helps to bring about a
spiritual revival for the Irish people. In addition, like T. S. Eliot and Ezra
Pound, Yeats also prized the epic form of literature highly and tried to
resuscitate it by using some of its elements in his poems. Although Yeats’s
interactions with the spiritual and religious traditions of the world have been
recognized and well documented in many scholarly works, the latter part of
Yeats’s efforts, unfortunately, has been largely ignored and has not been
properly discussed. The purpose of this paper is to illuminate Yeats’s use of
epic elements in his poems so that we can understand that one of the most
—
important characteristics of the modern poetry containing both lyric and epic
—
elements runs through the poems written by all three modernist poets.
A reading of Yeats’s essays on modern poetry reveals his conviction that
modern poetry should be rooted in the past. In “Modern Poetry: A Broad
Cast” (1936), Yeats wrote that “We tried to write like the poets of the Greek
Anthology, or like Catullus, or like the Jacobean Lyrists, men who wrote
while poetry was still pure. We did not look forward or look outward, we
left that to the prose writers; we looked back. We though it was in the very
nature of poetry to look back, . . .” (92) He also mentioned that “We, too,
thought always that style should be proud of its ancestry, or its traditional
high breeding . . .” (92) Here we know that what Yeats meant by its
ancestry includes Homer as he specifically pointed out in “A General
Introduction for my Work” (1937): “I hated and still hate with an ever
growing hatred the literature of point of view. I wanted, if my ignorance
permitted, to get back to Homer, to those that fed at his table.” (511) For
—
this reason, Edward Engelberg argued that “Yeats’s imagination if not his
—
talent was primarily neither lyric nor dramatic but epic. Had he lived in
another time he might have been a great epic poet” (3) in The Vast Design:
Patterns in W. B. Yeats’s Aesthetic. This view about Yeats is again echoed
by Daniel Albright who stated that “it is clear that Yeats himself thought of
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—
being Ireland’s epic poet and not only its Homer, but its Sophocles and its
Sappho as well” (14) in “Introduction: W. B. Yeats’s Poems.” In fact, a
reading of Yeats’s book of poems and some individual poems leads us to see
that the they are based upon the poet’s epic imagination, which was heavily
indebted to Homer.
Before discussing the epic elements in Yeats’s poems, we first need to
consider the basic traits of an epic. These definitions of an epic are drawn
from Holman and Harmon’s Handbook to Literature (1986). Epic is defined as
a long narrative POEM in elevated STYLE, presenting characters of high
position in a series of adventures which form an organic whole through their
relation to a central figure of heroic proportions and through their development
of EPISODES important to the history of a nation or race. The epic hero
generally participates in a cyclical journey or quest, faces adversaries that try
to defeat him in his journey and returns home significantly transformed by his
journey. The epic hero illustrates traits, performs deeds, and exemplifies
certain morals that are valued by the society from which the epic originates.
Many epic heroes are recurring characters in the legends of their native
culture. And there are common characteristics of an epic: an epic begins “in
the middle of things”, with the hero at his lowest point; its setting is vast in
scope, covering great nations, the world, or the universe; it begins with an
invocation to a muse; it begins with a statement of the theme; it includes the
use of epithets; contains long lists; it features long and formal speeches; it
shows divine intervention on human affairs; it features heroes that embody the
values of the civilization; it often features the tragic hero’s descent into the
underworld or hell. Evidently, Yeats did not incorporate all of the above epic
conventions in his poems but an examination of his major poems or book of
poems leads us to see that the poet tried to model some of his poems after
three of the basic natures of an epic: his poem begins with a hero or a
speaker who is in the lowest point, the hero sets out a physical or mental
The Epic Elements in Yeats’s Poetry
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journey to resolve his problems and comes back enlightened or changed and
the setting of his poem covers vast areas and spaces.
An examination of the settings Yeats established in some of his poems
leads us to see that they are vast in scope and scale, reminding us of that of
an epic. Let us first consider the setting of In the Seven Woods. Here Yeats
deliberately registers as many places as possible whether they are real,
imaginary, mythical, historical, religious or spiritual: the Seven Woods in “In
the Seven Woods,” the sleepy country and Echtge in “The Withering of the
Boughs,” the Garden of Eden in “Adam’s Curse,” Cummend Strand,
Knocknarea, Clooth-na-Bare in “Red Hanrahan’s Song About Ireland,”
Bryceline, Avalon, Uladh, Land-under-Wave (Underworld) in “Under the
Moon,” the ragged wood in “The Ragged Wood,” and the Kingdom of
Heaven in “The Happy Townland.” It is also interesting to note that the
characters in the book quite various: a young man, a woman, children, a king
and a queen, bankers, schoolmasters, clergymen, the daughter of Houlihan, the
old men, a sweetheart, masters, kinsmen, a farmer, mythic, historic, religious,
and spiritual figures. Obviously, Yeats seemed to intend to place his quest in
a broader and more universal context as befits an epic, the setting of which
is usually vast, encompassing the world or the universe. Let us take
Supernatural Songs, which are placed in Parnell’s Funeral and Other Poems
(1935) for another example. Here we also see Yeats’s tendency to cover as
many places as possible. Supernatural Songs starts with a setting of a tomb
of Baile and Aillin but it is not so much just a tomb as a sacred place
which contains the history of primitive Ireland by mentioning the union of
the apple and the yew, which symbolizes the Christian and Pagan tradition,
respectively. The second poem, “Ribh denounces Patrick,” takes the whole
earth as its setting by singing: “But all that run in couples, on earth, in flood
or air, share God that is but three.” In “There,” we see that the setting is
expanded to cover the universe: “There all the gyres converge in one,/ There
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all the planets drop in the Sun.” And Yeats also includes the unknown places
or primitive forest for his list of settings as we see in “What Magic Drum?”
and “Whence had they come?” “Conjunctions” explores the possibility of
uniting Jupiter and Saturn to deal with mythical realms; “A Needle’s Eye” is
talking about the smallest possible place out of which the past and the future
came. In “Meru,” the setting goes back to the earth by choosing Mount Meru
or Everest, but this time he also mentions the birthplaces of human
civilization: Egypt, Greece, and Rome, thereby encompassing the west and the
east in one poem.
When we look into the setting of an individual poem such as “Sailing to
Byzantium,” “Byzantium,” “The Double Vision of Michael Robartes,” and
“Among School Children,” we can easily note Yeats’s preference for the use
of vast scope in his writing. “Sailing to Byzantium” begins with a place,
Ireland, but it is eventually expanded to Byzantium, the symbol of the union
of the west and east. It is also interesting to see that when he talks about
the water which is important part of the setting in this poem, he tries to
encompass both river water and sea water by writing: “The salmon-falls, the
mackerel-crowded seas.” We also know that “The salmon-falls” means the
surface part of the water since salmon tends to jump out of the water, while
the mackerel-crowded seas point to the deeper part of the water since they
prefer to stay in deep water. Without doubt, Yeats deliberately intends to
make the setting even bigger by involving not only this world which consists
of the land, air, water, and but also the after world to which he is going
when he dies. “Byzantium” is no exception in that the setting includes this
world, the underworld, and after-world. The poem presents this world by
describing the landscape of the night city which is filled with negative
images such as drunken solders, night walkers or prostitutes, and “the fury
and the mire of human veins.” But the setting is expanded to include the
underworld, Hades and the after world where spirits of ghosts are going
The Epic Elements in Yeats’s Poetry
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“astraddle on the dolphin’s mire or blood.” In a similar vein, “The Double
Vision of Michael Robartes” starts with a description of the grey rock of
Cashel, a historic site located at Cashel, South Tipperary, Ireland. As the
poem progresses, however, the setting is enlarged to include the west and the
east by mentioning “A Sphinx” and “A Buddha.” The two different worlds
are fused to make a even bigger one since the poet tries to integrate the two
by using his favorite symbol of reconciliation: the dancer. So he sings: “And
right between these two a girl at play.” We can find a similar pattern in
“Among School Children” in that its setting is gradually expanded. The poem
begins with a small schoolroom in which we see “a kind old nun, the
children, and a sixty-year-old smiling public man.” As the poem progresses,
however, the setting is expanded in scope by incorporating Yeats’s
biographical elements (by referring to his experiences with Maud Gonne),
Greek philosophical concerns (by talking about Plato and Aristotle), Christian
religious aspects (by mentioning nuns and heavenly glory) and spiritual realms
(by singing the unity of being).
Analyzing characteristic natures of the speakers of Yeats’s poems, the
poet often place them in a place or a situation in which they face some sorts
of problems or hardships in the beginning of the poem, which is considered
another important element of an epic. As early as 1890’s when Yeats began
his career as poet, he started his poem by describing a troubled situation
from which his speaker tried to escape. In “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” the
speaker, whose miserable state is an obvious allusion of the Prodigal Son in
the Bible, dreams of running to a green paradise existing in his imagination
escaping from the grey city of London, a symbol of materialism,
commercialism, and imperialism. In fact, many poems written at the turn of
the century such as “The Lamentation of the Old Pensioner,” “The Lover
tells of the Rose in his Heart,” “In the Twilight,” “The Song of the Old
Mother,” and “He mourns for the Change that has come upon Him and his
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Beloved, and longs for the End of the World”begin with a description of
gloomy situation in which the speaker happens to be placed. Let us consider
another example. In “In the Seven Woods,” the opening poem of In the
Seven Woods, we meet the speaker of the poem, obviously a mouthpiece of
Yeats, who is already in the middle of troubles due to his personal and
political setback. That is, the poet miserably lost in his battle to win the
hand of Maud Gonne and he helplessly witnessed the political turmoils in
Ireland, causing severe depression on his mind. Hence, he turned to nature (“I
have heard the pigeons of the Seven Woods/ Make their faint thunder...”) to
nurse his emotional pains (“and put away/ The unavailing outcries and the
old bitterness/ That empty the heart”) and tried to forget troubled Irish
political situations (“I have forgot awhile / Tara Uprooted, and new
commonness / Upon the street and crying about the street.”) Here, what the
speaker seems to do best to deal with his problems is to forget them since
he repeats “forgot” twice in the poem: “I have forgot awhile ... Because it
(forgetting) is alone of all things happy.” But forgetting cannot solve his
problem and we feel some kind of unknown tension going on as the poem
moves to the end:
I am contented for I know that Quiet
Wanders laughing and eating her wild heart
Among pigeons and bees, while that Great Archer,
Who but awaits His hour to shoot, still hangs
A cloudy quiver over Parc-na-Lee. (CP 77)
The beginning situation of the speaker of “Sailing to Byzantium” is not much
different from that of In the Seven Woods in that he is at the lowest point of
his life. The poet’s anger, frustration, and bitterness can be easily felt from
the first line of the poem: “That is no country for old men. The young/ In
one another’s arms, birds in the trees/
—Those dying generations—at their
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song, ...” Needless to say, one of the problems the speaker is confronted with
is his inability to deal with the problem of physicality of human beings
which is bound to decay. Let us turn to “Parnell’s Funeral,” the opening
poem of the book of poems which ends with Supernatural Songs. Here we
meet a speaker who is faced with a different kind of problems. Basically, the
predicament of the speaker is resulted from the Death of one of the great
Irish politicians: Parnell. Yeats believed that Parnell was dragged down by
popular rage and hysterica passio of the Irish mob and he spit out his
bitterness:
Come, fix upon me that accusing eye.
I thirst for accusation. All that was sung.
All that was said in Ireland is a lie.
...
No loose-lipped demagogue had won the day.
No civil rancour torn the land apart. (CP 279)
The problems he is facing with is the legacy of Parnell’s death: the division
of Ireland. The bigger problem is that he cannot do anything except
expressing his rage and anger. “Among School Children” also posits the
problem the speaker is faced with in the beginning: the limitations of human
beings. It seems to me that Yeats chooses a schoolroom as his setting to
imply its physicality, corporeality, and confinement. The image of physicality
and corporeality of place is a symbolic manifestation of the corporeal domain
of a human body, which is subject to decomposition. In addition, the image
of an enclosed space solidifies the atmosphere of psychological and mental
limitation.
Yeats’s way of getting his speaker out of the troubled situations
mentioned above is also reminiscent of the epic in two ways. First, an
examination of the above-mentioned poems leads us to see that the poet
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frequently turns to the collective wisdom of the past or age-old religious
teachings for a clue to solve the problem his speaker is faced as is the cases
with the epic heroes who beg ancestors, sages or Gods for help. This is the
reason why Yeats deliberately changes the point of view from a singular in
the beginning to a plural in the end. In the Seven Woods starts with I,
dealing with a personal problem and setback, but ends with we, whose goal
is to enter into the Happy Townland, an imaginative place in which one’s
agony can be melted, suggesting a solution to the problem implied in the
beginning poem. In a similar way, the grumbling speaker in “Sailing to
Byzantium”turns to “sages standing in God’s holy fire” for help. “Among
School Children” also follows a similar pattern by starting I who is situated
in a helpless situation due to the dichotomy of life but ending with we who
announce collective wisdom: a solution lies in the realization of the unity of
being. In a similar context can we follow the order of poems in Parnell’s
Funeral and Other Poems, in which the bitterness of the speaker is stated in
the beginning poem but the poet explores a Christian heritage, the human
history and Eastern religious wisdom to pacify his rages in the following
poems.
Second, the way the speaker frees himself from the state of imprisonment,
anger, decaying, and frustration makes us think of a psychological or mental
voyage in quest of the Holy Grail or the awakening, another mark of
imitating the form of an epic. At the end of a journey, or the last stanza of
a poem, hence, we always witness a typical Yeatsian hero is born,
experiencing a Yeastian way of enlightenment or the unity of being. In the
Seven Woods, the speaker sees that the unity is achieved at ‘The Happy
Townland, the final stop of Yeats’s voyage to quest for his Holy Grail which
is hinted in the form of Great Archer in the beginning poem. The place,
aptly called, The Happy Townland, epitomizes a Yeatsian heavenly paradise
in which the speaker sees dancing queens in a crowd, a symbol of the union
The Epic Elements in Yeats’s Poetry
121
of sun and moon, death and life, and ephemerality and eternity. “Sailing to
Byzantium” is also talking about a similar journey: “And therefore I have
sailed the seas and come/ To the holy city of Byzantium.” Needless to add,
Byzantium, a symbol of unity of art and religion, is a different version of
The Happy Townland. The last stanza of “The Double Vision of Michael
Robartes” provides a similar scene in which the speaker experiences the
moment of enlightenment by seeing the dancer:
I knew that I had seen, had seen at last
That girl my unremembering nights hold fast
Or else my dreams that fly
If I should rub an eye,
And yet in flying fling into my meat
A crazy juice that makes the pulses beat (CP 172)
Starting from the small schoolroom, “Among School Children” also gradually
moves to the final destination in which the speaker sees the realization of the
unity of being: “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” In a similar
context can we understand Yeats’s choice of the last stop in “Meru,” the last
poem of Parnell’s Funeral and Other Poems; Meru is another Byzantium in
which the speaker overcomes the problem of time: the source of problematic
dichotomy. It seems to me that all the movement of the speaker from one
place (usually this world contaminated with mires and furies) to another place
( the heavenly paradise in which the all the opposing forces are dissolved)
can be thought as a vestige of an epic quality.
Yeats’s intention to incorporate epic elements (the vast setting, starting the
poem with the speaker in the middle of an action faced with predicaments,
and setting out a spiritual journey to resolve the problems) can be discussed
in the context of Modernist’s efforts to engage in a dialogue with the past
literary traditions. As Pericles Lewis writes in The Cambridge Introduction to
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Modernism,
English-language modernists such as Eliot and Ezra Pound treated literary
tradition with much greater respect. In radically changing the form of
English poetry, they sought not to destroy literature but to save it and to
retain for literature the authority that it seemed to be losing in the face of
industralization and mass culture. (131)
As I try to show throughout this paper, W. B. Yeats also belongs to this
modernist attempts to interpret the great literary tradition in a new light. I
think their efforts invite one more possible motive. Either by writing a
miniature epic like the Wasteland, a more ambitious epic like the Cantos, or
by constantly employing epic elements, Eliot, Pound and Yeats not only try
to place their literature in the universal context transcending the time and
space, but also communicate that they are the true descendent of great
western literary tradition. In an unpublished journal Yeats wrote: “We, even
more than Eliot, require tradition and though it may include much that is his,
it is not a belief or submission, but exposition of intellectual needs... the
need of old forms, old situations.... (The Identity of Yeats Ellmann 240)
At the hand of Yeats, hence, a new type of modern hero was born,
retaining some characteristics borrowing from an epic. The Yeatsian hero
represents a modern man who is frustrated, baffled, and enraged because of
the situation in which he happens to be placed. His struggles to escape from
the psychological confinement reminds us of Odysseus who tries to get away
from the island of Calypso. Like the epic hero who encounters a lot of
difficulties in the form of monsters, demons, and witches, the Yeatsian hero
is confronted with not only many real adversaries such as wanton royals,
petty politicians, and the mobs, as well as psychological foes appearing in the
form of agony, rages, doubts, helplessness, and sense of defeats. Sometimes,
his enemies are imperialism, commercialism, industrialism, and rationalism
The Epic Elements in Yeats’s Poetry
123
which Yeats oftens associated with England and modern world. As the epic
hero sets out on his journey to achieve his goal, uniting with his family,
overcoming setbacks and hardships in the course of wandering vast areas of
the world, so the Yeatsian hero goes on his psychological voyage registering
as many places as possibile in efforts to find a solution. Apart from the
whether his heroes really achieve the unity of being or not in the end, which
is controversial depending upon how we look at the final moment of each
poem, what is evident is that Yeats creates a kind of pseudo-epic through his
book of poems, thereby insinuating that his poems carry the tradition of
western literature started by Homer.
Although Yeats also tried to revive the tradition of epic through his
poems as Eliot and Pound did, his view of modern poetry was fundamentally
different from the two young poets. As Yeats himself revealed in “Modern
Poetry: A Broadcast,” “The English movement, checked by the realism of
Eliot, the social passion of the war poets, gave way to an impersonal
philosophical poetry.” (100) His sympathy was for Irish modern poetry, which
was in keeping with the folk tradition, “hardening and deepening
personalities” (E&I 506). Yeats is a modern poet inheriting the poetic legacy
of English Romanticism and Irish living folk tradition. This is why he time
and again pursued the idea of making and remaking himself through his
poems. It is not only because he is interested in a human story and believed
in the growth of a human being. but also because he thought he constituted
the model of a modern man.
Works cited
Albright, Daniel “Introduction: W. B. Yeats: The Poems” The Yeats Journal of
Korea 41 (2013): 11-48.
124
Baekyun Yoo
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D.C: The Catholic U of America P, 1988.
Ellmann, Richard The Identity of Yeats New York: Faber, 1964.
Eliot, T. S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Perspecta 19 (1982): 36-42.
Holman, C. Hugh. A Handbook to Literature. New York: Collier Macmillan, 1986
Pericles, Lewis. The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 2007.
Pound, Ezra The Cantos of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions, 1972.
___. Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions, 1968.
Yeats, W. B. The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, Ed. Richard J. Finneran. New
York: Scribner Paperback Poetry, 1983.
___. Essays and Introductions. New York: Collier Books, 1961.
___. The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats. Volume V Later Essays. Ed. William
H. O’Donnell. New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1994.
Manuscript peer-review process:
receipt acknowledged: Jun. 10, 2015.
revision received: Jul. 15, 2015.
publication approved: Aug. 5, 2015.
Edited by: Ilhwan Yoon