William Butler Yeats Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

William Butler Yeats - Essay ExampleYeats can get outdoor(a) with absolutely cliched poetical language like loveliness and still create lines of matchless significance about a womans beauty How many centuries spent/The sedentary soul/In toils of measurement/Beyond eagle or mole,/Beyond hearing or seeing, Or Archimedes guess,/To raise into being/That loveliness (Opening claim from the play Fighting the Waves). Of language he was a past master.The themes and subjects of Yeats poetry could be varied, because he was a man of varied interests and pursuits. Yeats could combine simplicity, a laconic style, and innate wisdom for commentary on war from a soldiers point of view I hump that I shall meet my fate/Somewhere among the clouds in a higher place/ Those that I fight I do not hate, Those that I guard I do not loveAn Irish Airman Forsees His Death, The Wild Swans at Coole. 1919).He could make a commentary on the Easter Rising in Ireland like he did with his poem Easter(1916) Too lo ng a make/ Can make a stone of the heart./O when may it suffice/ That is Heavens part, our part /To murmur name upon name,/As a mother names her electric shaver /When sleep at last has come /On limbs that had run wild. Or, he could write with a deep sense of almost Wordsworthian passion for the peace and beatitude of nature I will arise and go now, for always night and day/ I hear lake water lapping with petty(a) sounds by the shore/ While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,/ I hear it in the deep hearts core.(The Lake Isle of Innisfree, The Rose, 1893). In his final years, Yeats was also known to give expression of his occultist beliefs in a 2000-year cycle of existence The darkness drops again only now I know/ That twenty centuries of stony sleep/ Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,/ And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,/ Slouches towards Bethlehem to be innate(p)( The gage Coming, Michael Robartes and the Dancer.1919)This range and versat ility is the outcome of a lifetime of evolution, because Yeats is one of those rare breed of creative minds who can produce their best work in their waning years. Yeats was born on 13 June 1865, and came from an Anglo-Irish heritage. It was his mother who introduced him to Irish folktales which were to be an important influence on his poetry. He had ideal parents for his profession as a poet Yeats has told of the deep unrestrained reserves in his Sligo-born mother, whose actions were unreasoning and habitual like the seasons. From his father, John Butler Yeats, a man of original mind who had been trained in the law but turned to painting and to the pre-Raphaelite enthusiasms current in the 70s and 80s, Yeats early heard that intensity was important above all things. (Bogan, 1938)Yeats was moved to London from Ireland when he was two, and remained at that place for all his schooling till he enrolled in the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin for two years in 1884, and here he saw the early beginnings of his poetry. In Dublin he made famous acquaintances like G.B. Shaw, and W.E. Henley, and soon began to publish poetry, and in 1889, came out with The Wanderings of Usheen Oisin which included works