W.B.Yeats as a love poet

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W .B . Yeats as a Love Poet

It is useful first to point out the general point of reference of Yeats 's thought in regard to the academic background of his time . For all his apparent peculiarity of belief , Yeats as thinker lies for the most part in the mainstream of European Romanticism . He is not isolated rationally he offers lifelong loyalty to the all-encompassing romantic concept of the poet as seer and

prophet , one who by virtue of a sentient imagination has special knowledge , access to hidden monarchies of truth as Yeats phrased it , Imagination has some way of lighting on the truth that reason has not ' Yeats 's theory of imagination in particular recognizes him as a romantic : its elements come from the general understanding of Imagination in the Romantic tradition Kant and Coleridge are its greatest exponents . Yeats has accepted the Romantic sense of imagination as a creative power

Imagination 's creative power in Yeats is directed toward self-transformation , a process always implied in the romantic view of selfhood as well as personal freedom . Yeats shares the romantic dependence upon intuition and passion , asserting that the profound self is to be trusted romantic individualism , self-analysis , and fascination with the unique emotional self are all Yeatsian concerns . Together with Yeats 's interest in selfhood is an equivalent romantic striving for the sublime , inspiring , and supernatural , as evident in his occult and psychic interests and his thought for non-rational areas of experience

The 19th century romantic preoccupation with philosophic romanticism and religious mysticism as well finds natural outlet in Yeats 's work . Yeats is finally best portrayed as a product of the broad trends of nineteenth-century European Romanticism , the same fundamental concerns which aggravated such diverse personalities as Blake , Kant , Wordsworth and Shelley . Yeats , far from being an intellectual anomaly , draws a lot upon the broad tradition of the romantic view of man and the world It is with this general understanding that a study of the Yeatsian principles of art and selfhood has to begin

Unlike many other heroines , Maud Gonne lives a separate life with her distinct personality in Yeats 's works . Yeats 's poems and letters and memoirs disclose a relationship of temperamental and ideological differences between the two a relationship of unrequited love and out-of-body experience , sexual longing and unfulfilment complicated with the dynamics of their spiritual interests as well as psychosexual anxieties . It was a politically charged and mystically coded relationship . The idea of Maud Gonne served as a direct inspiration for Yeats 's poetic creativity and a sense of devotion , defeat , and melancholy pervades his work , allowing him to recreate an idealized Romantic past

The relationship , emotional or otherwise , of any great lyric poet with women treated as lovers , muses , companions , and fellow-workers has always been deservedly so . Moreover unlike the heroines of Swinburne Rossetti , and Morris , who Yeats thought did not have any separate lives...