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

Abstract

Parallels with and allusions to the English Romantics are abundant throughout Yeats’s work, but I would like to argue that it is perhaps his inherent affinity with the model of Romanticism developed in Germany at the end of the 18th Century that positions him most compellingly in the Romantic tradition. In this regard I suggest that it is with his 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 most fully evolved. My task, therefore, is twofold: firstly I must uncover what I have called Yeats’s Romanticism and then, secondly, I must show how it aligns him with the European Romantic tradition.