Expectations Failed: Different Shades of Disappointment in W. B. Yeats’s Selected Poems

Year 2019, Volume: 5 Issue: 2, 79 - 90, 14.12.2019

Zübeyir Savaş

Abstract

In his long literary career that lasted nearly a half-century, William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) was a prolific author of diverse fictive and non-fictive works. Along with dozens of lyric poems, Yeats also wrote numerous narrative poems, plays, essays, and reviews. It is apparent that he dealt with variety of themes and subjects in his writings, and one might also arguably expect to observe his engagement in political issues, for he was one of the intellectuals of his day with an Anglo-Irish background. Due to the overwhelming agenda of his day, a sudden wish to retreat appears to be a dominant theme in his works. Nonetheless, his escapism that might explicitly be observed in his poetry could not be limited to the political turmoil. He also suffered from separate disappointments caused by his private affairs as well. Accordingly, this study aims to foreground Yeats’s particular disappointments reflected in his lyrical poems such as “The Lake Of Innisfree” (1890), “When You Are Old” (1891), “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” (1918), and “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” (1939) that emerged from specific incidents.

Keywords

William Butler Yeats, disappointment, The Lake Of Innisfree, When You Are Old, An Irishman Foresees His Death, The Circus Animals’ Desertion

References

• Brooks, P. (2011). The madness of art: Enigmas of identity. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
• Ellmann, R. (1965). Yeats: The man and the masks. London: Faber.
• Finneran, R. J. (2002). The Yeats reader: A portable compendium of poetry, drama, and prose. New York: Scribner.
• Flesch, W. (2010).The facts on file companion to British poetry 19th century. New York: FactonFile.
• Foster, R. F. (2005). W.B. Yeats: A life: volume II: The arch-poet, 1915-1939. USA. Oxford University Press.
• Holdeman, D. (2010). The Cambridge introduction to W.B. Yeats. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Hong, S. S. (2016). The Reaction of Yeats and Heaney to the Irish Civil War. The Yeats Journal of Korea. 51, 123-142.
• Hunter, C. S. (1984). Return to ‘la Bonne Vaux’: The Symbolic Significance of Innisfree. Modern Language Studies, 14(3), 70-81.
• Jeffares, A. N. (2014). Commentary on the collected poems of W. B. Yeats. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Ramazani, J. (2009). A Transnational poetics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
• Rawl, M. S. (2012). Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone: Social criticism and Yeats’s later plays. (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Texas, U.S.: Baylor University. Available at https://baylor-ir.tdl.org/handle/2104/8460
• Renaux, S. (2010). Ronsard And Yeats: An exercise in intertextuality. RevistaLetras, 40, 85-97.
• Riel, K. (2015). ‘I do not love’: Rethinking W.B. Yeats’s ‘Elegies’ of Major Robert Gregory. Journal of Modern Literature, 38(2), 1-15.
• Ross, D. A. (2009). Critical companion to William Butler Yeats: A literary reference to his life and work. New York: Facts On File.
• Yeats, W. B. (1934). Collected poems. London: Macmillan.
• Yeats, W. B. (1994). Collected poems of W. B. Yeats. London: Wordsworth Editions.
• Yeats, W. B. (1999). The trembling of the veil. In D. N. Archibald, & W. H. O’Donnell. (Eds.) W. B. Yeats autobiographies, (pp. 109-169). New York: Scribner.