Yeats Poetry Analysis

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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 …show more content…

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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