Why is William Butler Yeats important?

Irish poet, dramatist, and prose writer William Butler Yeats was the preeminent writer of the Irish literary renaissance at the turn of the 20th century. In 1923 Yeats became the first Irish writer to receive a Nobel Prize for Literature.

Why is Yeats a great poet?

“Yeats has had an enormous influence on the 20th Century lyric poem. He re-energised the [possibilities of the] stanza, especially in his later work. Above all, he made the lyric persona available in new ways – a persona that had grown soft-focus and sentimental in the last years of the 19th Century.”

What is considered as the greatest work of WB Yeats?

Sailing to Byzantium uses a journey to Byzantium as a metaphor for a spiritual journey. It is considered one of the best works of Yeats and it is the most famous poem of his greatest poetry collection, The Tower.

What are the major themes in W.B. Yeats poetry?

The result is that his themes cover such wide ranging areas as love, politics, old- age art, aristocracy, violence and prophecy, history myth, courtesy hatred, innocence, anarchy and nostalgia.

What FROM did Yeats first important poem take?

Answer: His first significant poem was “The Island of Statues”, a fantasy work that took Edmund Spenser and Shelley for its poetic models. The piece was serialized in the Dublin University Review.

What is WB Yeats most famous poem?

Perhaps one of his most famous poems, ‘The Stolen Child’, tops our list of the best W.B. Yeats poems of all time. Its major theme is the loss of innocence as a child grows up. Written in 1886 when Yeats was just 21, ‘The Stolen Child’ is one of his works that is strongly rooted in Irish mythology.

What did Yeats write?

Yeats continued to write until his death. Some of his important later works include The Wild Swans at Coole (1917), A Vision (1925), The Tower (1928) and Words for Music Perhaps and Other Poems (1932). Yeats passed away on January 28, 1939, in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France.

What is WB Yeats style of writing?

The Transition from Romanticism to Modernism Yeats started his long literary career as a romantic poet and gradually evolved into a modernist poet. When he began publishing poetry in the 1880s, his poems had a lyrical, romantic style, and they focused on love, longing and loss, and Irish myths.

What then WB Yeats poem?

‘What then?’ The work is done,’ grown old he thought, ‘According to my boyish plan; Let the fools rage, I swerved in naught, Something to perfection brought’; But louder sang that ghost, ‘What then?’

What are the major themes in WB Yeats poetry?

When he began publishing poetry in the 1880s, his poems had a lyrical, romantic style, and they focused on love, longing and loss, and Irish myths. His early writing follows the conventions of romantic verse, utilizing familiar rhyme schemes, metric patterns, and poetic structures.

What does then poem mean?

Humans always strive for perfection, which is denoted by Plato’s ghost. Whenever the narrator is about to bring something to a near stage of perfection, Plato’s ghost undercuts it with a “What then” indicating that the narrator has only achieved a percentage of perfection.

Why is Yeats important to Irish history?

Yeats is the greatest poet in the history of Ireland and probably the greatest poet to write in English during the twentieth century; his themes, images, symbols, metaphors, and poetic sensibilities encompass the breadth of his personal experience, as well as his nation’s experience during one of its most troubled times.

What is Yeats’s own experience in his poems?

Yeats’s own experience is never far from his poems, even when they seem obscurely imagistic or theoretically abstract, and the veil of obscurity and abstraction is often lifted once one gains an understanding of how the poet’s lived experiences relate to the poem in question.

Is Yeats the most universal writer of all time?

But Yeats’s goal is always to arrive at personal truth; and in that sense, despite his profound individuality, he remains one of the most universal writers ever to have lived.

What did Yeats think about Rhymers?

Although Yeats was soon to abandon that lush density, he remained permanently committed to the Rhymers’ insistence that a poet should labor “at rhythm and cadence, at form and style”—as he reportedly told a Dublin audience in 1893.