The face there, if you have seen him before, you will recognize as Yeats’s. Now, there’s something to this story but it is also a kind of cliché, and I’ll try to introduce, I think, a more true and also more interesting way of understanding Yeats’s development today, starting with this picture. What’s that story? Well, Yeats begins as a Romantic visionary and a late nineteenth-century aesthete, and under the pressure of political and social crisis he breaks with the artificial rhetoric of his early poems and becomes a kind of heroic realist. ![]() Yeats’s career is maybe the most famous one in modern poetry that is, a career that has been seen as a kind of representative story about modern poetry as a whole. And in fact today, right now, we’re going to move back the furthest we go, all the way into the nineteenth century to talk about the early Yeats. In class I’ll talk about “Easter 1916,” “The Magi,” “The Second Coming,” “Leda and the Swan,” and I’d like you to pay special attention to these special Yeatsian words: “tumult,” “turbulence,” “bestial.” Think about also that phrase “terrible beauty” in “Easter 1916.” And finally, in your RIS packet you’ll see a timeline that charts significant dates in modern poetry that tells you something about when the different poets we’re reading were working, and helps you perhaps keep track of them because confusingly, although the course has a kind of rough chronological order, we do move back and forth in time. And on Wednesday I’ll also hand out a topic for paper number one. And this poem could be the basis of a first paper, a topic for one. You don’t have to do this for Wednesday but let’s say for next Monday, and that is: I’d like you to memorize a short poem by Yeats or by Frost, either one. I know that your teaching fellows will have handed out a meter exercise for you. For the next class I’d like you to, well, I’d like you to do a few things. Professor Langdon Hammer: For Wednesday – This is my – our first Yeats lecture. ![]() Modern Poetry ENGL 310 - Lecture 4 - William Butler YeatsĬhapter 1.
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