The Characteristics Of Romanticism In William Butler Yeats's Poetry

William Butler Yeats, especially in his earlier poetry, was one of the most important romantic poets, who exerted a great influence on his contemporaries as well as successors. Though, in his later poetry, the modern tradition which he used was opposite to romanticism, however, there is enough in Yeats’ poetry which is unmistakably romantic.

Yeats in his early poetic stage believed in the theory of “art for life’s sake”. But in the nineties, he became the advocate of “art for art’s sake”. Influenced by the French Symbolist and the English Aesthetes he started writing “pure poetry”, free from all the exterior decorations.

Escape from the realities of life is one of the major romantic qualities. Yeats was a greater escapist than Keats and unlike Keats he does not want to come back into reality. Yeats’ early poems made him very popular in the English middle class who wanted to escape from the ugliness and crudity of the industrial civilization. So Yeats was able to carry his readers into a kind of Celtic Twilight. In “Sailing to Byzantium” the poet disgusted with realities of life wishes to escape:

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,

Self-revelation is another romantic trait in Yeats’ poetry. Like Romantics, he also wrote deeply personal poetry revealing his spirit, thoughts, feelings and so on. In “Easter 1916”, he remarks on various persons who had been close with him in his life. In “The Tower”, he is able to sublimate his loss