- 75 views
- 249 downloads
W.B. Yeats’s A Vision: Magical and Poetic Symbols for Personal, Social, and Historical Contexts
-
- Author / Creator
- Leeper, Jessica R.
-
W.B. Yeats saw himself as Ireland’s poet of historical record, even titling key poems to convey the centrality of Irish history to those poems and, eventually, to Irish historical self-understanding. Several of Yeats’s polemical, socially oriented poems have an internal logic that derives from, and is traceable to, A Vision’s occultist and aesthetic investments. A Vision is like a filter in a web where texts’ symbolic imagery interacts—a web of philosophy, mysticism, occult doctrines, artistic beliefs, Irish literature and politics. The primacy of the poetic symbol—and the rhetorical authority of the logic of symbols—is central to the intersection of A Visions and Yeats’s poetry (and central to my project) as well as his literary undertakings. By focusing on the Mask, Sun and Moon, Round Tower, and the Great Wheel as key symbols from Yeats’s A Vision, this paper studies the balanced oscillation between objective and subjective experiences throughout Yeats’s poetry, understandable as the poet’s endless quest through abstraction, transcendence, and immanence. The project migrates between the esoteric, occult, aesthetic, theoretical, and material or social conditions influencing Yeats’s thinking and writing. Seemingly, Yeats uses A Vision to filter and adapt the external world, like Irish folklore and events from the Irish Civil War, so he can look and speak through a reimagined perspective that invests in his experiences and provides personal means of expression for his poetry. Simultaneously, however, Yeats’s canonical and public poems align (and sometimes misalign) with the symbolic logic outlined in A Vision. Ultimately, Yeats’s symbols reveal that eternal conflict and oscillation are necessary for conceiving and creating poetry. The symbolic language in Yeats’s work reconstructs artistic representations of Ireland’s mythic past, historical present, imagined self and nation. Thus, my thesis also reassesses and suggests what Yeats sees as the modernist poet’s role and responsibility in shaping a sense of individual and collective imagination and identity.
-
- Subjects / Keywords
-
- Graduation date
- Fall 2023
-
- Type of Item
- Thesis
-
- Degree
- Master of Arts
-
- License
- This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Libraries with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.