‘Death-in-life and life-in-death’ : Yeats’s Romanticism

Abstract

Parallels with, and allusions to, the English Romantics abound in Yeats’s poetry, but an inherent affinity between his work and the model of Romanticism developed in Germany at the end of the eighteenth century is less widely acknowledged, and yet perhaps is even more intriguing. This proximity to early German Romanticism is most clearly evident in Yeats’s visionary middle-period poetry and, indeed, it might be argued that it is this poetry that positions him most compellingly in the broad European Romantic tradition. In this regard, I would like to suggest that it is with this middle-period poetry and, in particular, with what one might call a certain restorative, visionary experience of the ‘death’ of the self, which he works into his poetry, that Yeats’s Romanticism is at its most fully evolved.