Neil Bowen on
The journey towards being a public figure.
He might seem to write something that is personal but it will have a wider resonance. He is not the 'bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast'.
'I think all happiness depends on the energy to assume the mask of some other life'.
Yeats's poetry uses opposites (and persona or masks) to sieve progression (like Blake) and from the dialectic between these oppositions comes truth.
Yeats poetry
Is is a straightforward development?
Richard Ellmann - he circles around a particular set of symbols.
Seamus Deane - he moves from an invented Ireland to a more realistic one.
Stan Smith - in the love poetry we find political passion and vice versa.
Seamus Heaney - his revisions are a model for us all. He finds personae appropriate to a variety of ideas.
Symbols of the Celtic twilight poems have meaning beyond the decorative. They left the veil between reality and unreality thus showing us a hyper-reality. A Freudian might say he's putting to sleep the conscious memory. Jung might say he is drawing on a collective memory.
Contrast 'On Being Asked for a War Poem' ( what can a poet do?)
With Easter 1916 which makes overt political statements.
Yeats deplored what he saw as vulgar narrow philistinism and responded to what he saw as controversies in his own time(Parnell, Synge, Hugh Lane's pictures). See the intro to 'Responsibilities' for more detail. This is also shown in the vicious attack at the start of 'September 1913'.
Is Easter 1916 a palinode? A different mask? Authoritative diction. Ambivalent about them but at least they stood up and died.
A senator - of the Irish free state from1922. He supported the new Irish government. It was a time of great civil unrest.
Dr Byrne argues that it isn't a linear development but a combination of cycles and changing persona. The political and the private are intertwined.
'In Memory of Con Markiewicz and Eva Gore Booth' - is this a refutation of politics. Yeats was unhappy with the idea of women being involved with politics.
As an older man he was interested in sex and one poem gives this, not politics, as his stimulus. 'In the face of decline and death' shows his mind shifting from politics to personal desires.