The politics in the poetry of William Butler Yeats

Abstract

William Butler Yeats is universally known as Ireland’s National Poet, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923 - a man curiously involved in the politics of his country in more ways than one. The Irish have an interesting relationship with politics with facets of politics- governance, conflict and struggle found in every fibre of their identity, psychology, ancestry, religion, history, culture and memory. In this dissertation, I will attempt to map out the nuancing relationship that William Butler Yeats had with politics and its impetus on his poetry and life. Defining himself from a nationalistic ideal and the apotheosis of the rich mythical past he was born into, to the aspirations of developing an independent cultural identity through ballad poetry, then onto an embodiment of conflicting ambivalence and otherness, it was politics as an identifying image and most basic cellular element that defined the Irish and Yeats himself. I will attempt to make a few observations on the symbiotic relationship between politics and poetry: two elements in Yeats’s mind, psyche and spirit which proved to be more similar to that of a biological process of dichotomic autolysis, hence being destructive in spirit simply because of the powerful impetus they both created in Yeats’s world. This ironically and oxymoronically resulted in sublime poetics right up to Yeats’s death, created out of Yeats’s abject disillusionment at the seemingly fatal position he found himself in, being too alienated to ever renew any sort of patriotic commitment. It could be said that the relationship between politics and poetics commenced as a mutualistic one, developing into a state of amensalism ending with one of parasitism where Yeats’s political belief dissipated into utter disillusion while his heightened poetics thrived even through to the very end. The nadir of his poetics which seem so independently self- serving seemed like an exalted reaction to the diametrically opposed abysmal disillusionment in what had previously initially fired his poetics. In the Introduction, I will start by exploring the distinction Yeats made between poetry and rhetoric, the impact of that difference on his work and his life and how he perceived the role of the poet. In the first chapter I will explore the heritage of politics, history and religion that Yeats was born into and how that influenced his poetry. I will also discuss Yeats’s key influences in relation to his poetics and politics. Chapter Two will deal with Yeats’s role within the political arena as active participant and statesman. I will explore the politics of identity, culture, patriotism and nationalism and Yeats’s desire to be read as a nationalist poet. I will discuss the political component within the poetic/political composite and the question of whether it was politics that served his poetry, vice versa or whether it was an even more complex composite that politics and poetry served. The third chapter will touch on the politics and poetics of change, disillusionment, dislocation, alienation and of loss, sentiments that Yeats initially experienced, similar to other Irish writers attempting to create a political, national and cultural identity. His feelings of dislocation were later seriously compounded by his being accused of disloyalty, of being a Fascist and ambivalent, an alienation that Yeats embodied through his detachment from the political direction, hypocrisy and fragmentation he witnessed around him in the post-Parnellite era. Chapter Four will trace ‘The Politics of Controversy’ and attempt an understanding of why Yeats continues to ‘generate discomfort’, to be the subject of controversial debate in his permanency and validity as National Poet as well as a controversial poet whose politics and beliefs transcend into his poetry. The conclusion will explore the perspectives that politics and poetry represented for Yeats in a life dedicated to the pursuit of hammering his disjuncted beliefs and refractory identities of contrasts into unity which he never achieved in his vision but which left him with ‘dissipation and despair’ like ‘a fly struggling in marmalade’. Yeats as a national poet embodied the entrapment within, creating the isolated psyche of turbulence and disjunction as well as the implosive quarrel between selves and anti-selves, the disunity and individuality, which led to the resignation for his mouth to be ultimately silent. Was it the poetry which helped the politics to thrive or the politics which served the poetry to exist and at what cost to Yeats? Did the apple on that bough of the apple tree, for which Yeats hungered so, prove to be too far out of reach, even for one as masterful as he or did he feel he reached it after all?