Transcript Presentazione di PowerPoint

William Butler Yeats
(1865-1939)
Performer - Culture & Literature
Marina Spiazzi, Marina Tavella,
Margaret Layton © 2013
Jonathan
W.B. YeatsSwift
1. Life
• 1865  born in Dublin, Ireland, into a middle-class
family belonging to the Protestant minority.
• His father was a free thinker
with an anti-clerical attitude.
• As a student, Yeats was attracted
to mystical doctrines and magic.
Performer - Culture & Literature
Jonathan
W.B. YeatsSwift
1. Life
•
1889  met Maud Gonne, an actress and a patriot
who led him into the politics of the Irish
Republican Brotherhood.
•
1890s  met Lady Gregory who
supported his project of the Abbey
Theatre, a literary theatre to fight
the commercial theatre.
•
1893  published a series of essays,
Maud Gonne
The Celtic Twilight, to promote an Irish renaissance.
Performer - Culture & Literature
Jonathan
W.B. YeatsSwift
1. Life
•
1922  He was a member
of the Irish Senate from
1922 to 1928.
•
1923  In December he
was the first Irish author to
be awarded the Nobel
Prize for literature.
•
1939  He died in France.
Performer - Culture & Literature
W. B. Yeats and his wife Georgie in 1923.
Jonathan
W.B. YeatsSwift
2. The Celtic Revival
Britain introduced a
ban on the Gaelic
language in Ireland
Native Irish literature was in danger
of being lost.
For Yeats the artist’s
role was
the creation of a new culture,
based on Ireland’s past.
Yeats collected Irish
folklore
and hoped in an Irish cultural
renaissance.
Performer - Culture & Literature
Jonathan
W.B. YeatsSwift
2. The Celtic Revival
At first he shared the
Nationalists’ concern.
Grew disenchanted
with the Nationalist
movement
he saw it dominated by the values
of the Catholic middle classes.
Changed his political
attitude after
the cruel treatment
by the British
of the 1916 Easter
Rebellion
gradually placed his sympathies
with the ‘moderate’ members of the
government.
Performer - Culture & Literature
Jonathan
W.B. YeatsSwift
3. Yeats’s themes
• Faith in the beauty and eternity of art.
• The relationship between the poet and the Irish
people and tradition.
• Death  unlike an animal, which simply dies, man
dies many times before his death.
• The heroic individual  loneliness characterises his
heroes because their superior qualities distinguish them
from the common man.
Benbulben, County Sligo, Ireland.
Performer - Culture & Literature
Jonathan
W.B. YeatsSwift
4. Yeats’s style
• Employed antithesis, oxymoron and paradox 
his imagination worked through the conflict and resolution
of opposites.
• Complete coincidence
between period and stanza
 made possible
by frequent enjambement.
• Sensual and sensory language  dynamic and energetic
syntax, rich in verbs of motion and action.
Performer - Culture & Literature
Jonathan
W.B. YeatsSwift
5. Yeats’s vision of history
Life and all of its phases
Cycles spiralling upwards or downwards
towards a fixed climax until
THE CYCLE REVERSES
Performer - Culture & Literature
Jonathan
W.B. YeatsSwift
5. Yeats’s cyclical theory of history
While one civilisation’s people are born, live and die;
they move towards their own annihilation.
From this civilisation’s death, another
civilisation arises.
The point at which one era’s struggle for death
coincides with the next era’s struggle for birth
provokes a violent turn of the gyre.
Performer - Culture & Literature
Jonathan
W.B. YeatsSwift
5. Gyres
The gyre is one of Yeats’s
favourite motifs, based on the idea
that history occurs in cycles.
‘A single gyre resembles a funnel,
which begins at a fixed point.
From this point the spiral grows
wider and wider until it reaches
its maximum growth.
At this climax, the single gyre
“begins to retrace its path in the
opposite direction.’
Performer - Culture & Literature
Jonathan
W.B. YeatsSwift
6. Yeats’s symbolism
To Yeats the symbol has a ‘visionary’ dimension,
it offers ‘revelation’.
.
It has an effective role in shaping both the
individual and the collective consciousness.
It is not only a device he uses to present his
themes. It is a theme in itself, in which truths
are embodied, in all their complexity.
Performer - Culture & Literature
Jonathan
W.B. YeatsSwift
6. Yeats’s symbolism
‘I can not now think symbols less than the greatest of all
powers, whether they are used consciously by the masters
of magic, or half-unconsciously by their successors, the
poet, the musician and the artist.’
(W.B. Yeats, Magic, 1901)
Byzantium symbolises 
Unity of Being, in which
religious, aesthetic and
practical life are one.
“And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.”
Performer - Culture & Literature
Jonathan
W.B. YeatsSwift
6. Yeats’s symbolism
‘I can not now think symbols less than the greatest of all
powers, whether they are used consciously by the masters of
magic, or half-unconsciously by their successors, the poet,
the musician and the artist.’
(W.B. Yeats, Magic, 1901)
The swan symbolises
The unchanging,
flawless ideal
The Wild Swans at Coole
Performer - Culture & Literature
A violent divine force
Leda and the Swan