RELIGIOUS AWARENESS IN THE POEMS OF W.B.YEATS Dr. Sushil Kumar Mishra Associate Professor and Former Head Department of English, SRM University Sonepat, Haryana
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ABSTRACT
William Butler Yeats has been regarded as one of the extraordinary modern poets. His poems are famous for his religious awareness. Yeats inspired and influences T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and W.B. Auden with his modernist views and religious awareness. Just as T.S. Eliot has expressed religious awareness in his poems “Gerontion” and “The Waste Land”. In these poems Eliot has exposed a civilization given over to international money
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It has forgotten the message of Christ and lost all belief in Christian religion. Similarly Yeats has also expressed religious awareness in his poems The Second Coming and Sailing to Bazantium. In The Second Coming Yeats expresses the modern man’s groping for new values in the spiritual darkness prevailing all around. In the first eight lines of the poem Yeats gives a very vivid and suggestive picture of the spiritual chaos prevailing in modern times. In Sailing to Byzantium Yeats aspired to attain eternity by his spiritual voyage to Byzantium. Yeats started his long literary career as a romantic poet and gradually evolved into a modernist poet. There are four common themes love, Irish Nationalism, religious awareness and mysticism in Yeats’ poetry but modernism is the overriding theme in his poetry. As a typical modern poet he laments for the great devastation and destruction of the 1st World War and regrets for post-war modern world which is in disorder and chaotic situation. . He is a renowned poet in …show more content…
B. Yeats as a modern poet: Yeats, like T. S. Eliot, is a representative modern poet and presents the spirit of the age in his poetry. Like Eliot, Yeats also uses myth, symbolism, juxtaposition, colloquial language and literary allusions as a device to express the anxiety of modernity. After the World war-I people got totally shattered and they suffered from frustration, boredom, anxiety and loneliness. Yeats has used different type of landscape to symbolize the spiritual and psychological states of modern man while analysing his poems. Now, let us analyze some of his poems individually to trace out modern
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By hiding the moon, which can be used to mark the passage of time with its cyclical phases, time itself becomes as equally amorphous as the cloud. Moreover, Yeats himself understood, in “The Symbolism of Poetry”, the moon to carry “memories” mixed with “her ancient names and meanings” (380). Thus, in hiding the moon, erotic love plunges the speaker and his lover into a world where histories, bearing the moon’s “ancient names and meanings”, are obscured, situating them in a world of their own. In the poem itself, time passes ambiguously. The poem is written largely in the past tense, with the title “[m]emory of [y]outh” indicating the speaker is aged and reflecting on the erotic love, as “moments passed” during his youth.
T.S. Eliot is a worldwide famous poet, an American modernist, and the winner of the 1894 Nobel Prize in Literature. Eliot changed the existing order in English literature. His poetry and literary criticism changed the literary interests of the whole generation. Through his poems, he forces people to know the history of the development of English poetry and to look at the seventeenth-century England with a new vision of Romanticism. At the same time, his works deepen people 's understanding of French symbolism in the nineteenth century and make people more aware of the possibility of drawing lessons from foreign poetry.
Fourthly, modern poetry involved symbolism, greatest example being T.S. Eliot and W.B. Yeats. Lastly, modern poetry is impersonal, anti-romantic, and innovative in attitude and approaches to life. It opposed to romantic poetry of spontaneity and imagination. William Butler Yeats was born on June13, 1865,
He supported the free verse and skillfully practiced the techniques of collage and allusion. Pound placed a value on novelty and experimentation that helps define what we see as the avant-garde today (Lewis and Domestico). Pound had the most contentious career of any twentieth-century poet, and his overall place in American literature is more controversial than that of any other modernist. As a poet, a critic, and a promoter of other writers, Pound was crucial to the growth of modernist poetry. T. S. Eliot, in dedicating his poem