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SONS AND LOVERS

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Yeats's poem protagonist 5

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Yeats's poem protagonist 4

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BBC - History - 1916 Easter Rising - Profiles - James Connolly

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BBC history site with profiles of some of the key figures in the 1916 Easter Rising in Ireland

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Yeats's poem protagonist 3

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Yeats's poem protagonist 2

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BBC - History - 1916 Easter Rising - Profiles - Patrick Pearse

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BBC history site with profiles of some of the key figures in the 1916 Easter Rising in Ireland

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Yeats's poem protagonist

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The exploits of the 'Larkinite rebel countess', Constance Markievicz, dominated contemporary press accounts of the Easter Rising. The scene at the College of Surgeons when she kissed her revolver before handing it over to the British officer at the moment of surrender passed instantly into Irish nationalist mythology.

Constance Markievicz was born in London. Her Protestant ascendancy family, the Gore-Booths, owned Lissadell, an extensive estate in Co. Sligo. She was presented at court to Queen Victoria in the monarch's Jubilee year, 1887. The unpredictable pattern of her subsequent career began when she married a Polish Count, Casimir Markievicz; with little in common, they separated amicably at the outbreak of World War One when he went off to the Balkans as a war reporter. In 1909, she first became known to British intelligence for her role in helping found Na Fianna Éireann, a nationalist scouts organisation whose purpose was to train boys for participation in a war of liberation. She was also active in the Irish suffragette movement and focussed much energy into Inghinidhe na hÉireann, a militant women's organisation founded by Maud Gonne. She co-operated closely with the labour leaders, James Larkin and James Connolly. Her compassion for the poor was evident during the 1913 Dublin Lockout when she worked tirelessly to provide food for the workers' families. Two years later she helped organise and train the Irish Citizen Army.

During the Easter Rising Markievicz was second-in-command to Michael Mallin at St. Stephen's Green/College of Surgeons and was active in a fighting capacity throughout the week. Afterwards, she was the only woman to be court-martialled (4 May 1916). It was later alleged by the Prosecution Counsel that she 'crumpled up' at her trial but the official records indicate that she acted throughout with courage, dignity and defiance, declaring: "I did what I thought was right, and I stand by it". The verdict reached by the court in her case was unique: 'Guilty. Death by being shot', but with a recommendation to mercy 'solely and only on account of her sex'. The sentence was commuted to penal servitude for life.

Markievicz served 13 months in gaol, in Ireland and in England, claiming subsequently that her inspiration during her imprisonment had been Thomas Clarke - a signatory of the Proclamation - who was executed with Pearse and MacDonagh on 3 May 1916. Afterwards she was unforgiving in her attitude towards the Irish Volunteer Chief of Staff, Eoin MacNeill, who had opposed and tried to prevent the insurrection. In the General Election, December 1918, she became the first woman ever returned to the Commons at Westminster but as a member for Sinn Féin she did not take her seat. Instead she served as Minister of Labour (April 1919-21) in the first Dail. As the then leader of Cumann na mBan, she bitterly opposed the Anglo-Irish Treaty (December 1921) and supported the anti-Treaty forces in the civil war. She later joined de Valera`s party, Fianna Fail. She died in a Dublin hospital in 1927; the working class people of the city lined the streets for her funeral.

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BBC - History - 1916 Easter Rising - Profiles - Countess Markievicz

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The exploits of the 'Larkinite rebel countess', Constance Markievicz, dominated contemporary press accounts of the Easter Rising. The scene at the College of Surgeons when she kissed her revolver before handing it over to the British officer at the moment of surrender passed instantly into Irish nationalist mythology.

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FILM

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Lit. Inglesa III. "Sons and lovers". Part 2/2

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SparkNotes: Sons and Lovers: Overall Summary

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A short summary of D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers. This free synopsis covers all the crucial plot points of Sons and Lovers.

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The White Peacock  (1911) by David Herbert Lawrence

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The White Peacock  (1911) by David Herbert Lawrence

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chapter

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The White Peacock - Wikisource, the free online library

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T. S. Eliot is widely regarded as one of the most important poets of the last hundred years. Here at Interesting Literature we're devoted fans of his work, and this got us thinking: which ten defining poems would we recommend to people who want to read him? Although he didn't write a huge amount of poetry (compared with, say, his contemporary Ezra Pound, whose The Cantos is nearly 800 pages), it can still be difficult for readers to pick out those works which most define him. And, of course, every Eliot fan's choice of ten is likely to different. Here are our recommendations, in the form of a countdown, from 10 to 1 (1 being what we think is the best).

As we take you through our suggestions, we'll drop in a few interesting snippets of information - the story behind the poem, or its surprising legacy, and so on. With the exception of number 9 on this list, which is from Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, all poems are available in Collected Poems 1909-62.

Note: T. S. Eliot's complete poems have now been published in two definitive scholarly editions edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue: T. S. Eliot The Poems Volume Oneand T. S. Eliot The Poems Volume Two. They include previously unpublished poems, are beautifully produced and scrupulously edited, and are must-haves for the diehard Eliot fan!

So, let us go then ...
10. 'Morning at the Window'.
This nine-line poem, probably begun in autumn 1914 shortly after the outbreak of WWI, describes the speaker's impressions of the street outside as he peers from the window. The poem presents a series of miniature observations about modern urban life: the sound of dirty plates being rattled in basement kitchens, the housemaids hanging around outside the properties where they are employed, the brown fog (reminiscent of the dark fog in much nineteenth-century French poetry, and in fiction such as Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde).

The poem is strongly influenced by the French poets Eliot had been reading, notably Charles Baudelaire and Jules Laforgue. Baudelaire, in particular, had showed Eliot how the modern city could be a fitting subject for the poet, as Eliot later recorded in his essay 'Baudelaire'. The key, Eliot said, was to elevate ordinary everyday details to a higher pitch - to bring out the quasi-transcendent qualities of modern life. We glimpse this in that fleeting smile which is 'torn' from that passer-by, which lingers for a moment before vanishing 'along the level of the roofs.' The scene of basement kitchens and the 'damp souls of housemaids' (once read, never forgotten) will linger long in your memory.

We have analysed this poem here.
9. 'The Naming of Cats'.
Okay, we had to include something from Eliot's ailurophilic 1939 work Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (the inspiration for Andrew Lloyd-Webber's musical, Cats; 'Old Possum' was Ezra Pound's nickname for Eliot).

This poem is our favourite of the cat poems: its jaunty rhythms show just how metrically deft Eliot was, and the names of the cats are terrific - 'Bombalurina' was even taken up by children's entertainer Timmy Mallett and his band, whose 'Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini' still occasionally terrorises the airwaves. Meanwhile, Mungojerrie found themselves (as Mungo Jerry) enjoying a huge pop hit with 'In the Summertime'.
8. 'The Hippopotamus'.
Sticking with animals, we've chosen this, one of seven 'quatrain poems' Eliot wrote for his second volume of poetry. The premise of this poem is a comparison between the large African mammal and the True Church. If that strikes you as odd, wait till you get to the image of the hippopotamus being lifted up to heaven, surrounded by a choir of angels. This is an unusual T. S. Eliot poem in that it is arch, ironic, and even absurdly comic.

We have analysed this poem here.
7. 'Preludes'.
This is an almost imagistic portrayal of modern urban living with all is squalid and unseemly aspects. Although critic Hugh Kenner thought these poems were not imagist per se, they are perhaps the meeting-point between Eliot's poetry and that of poets like Richard Aldington, T. E. Hulme (whose work we've discussed here), and F. S. Flint. Things don't change, the world keeps turning, things largely remain constant.

In this quartet of short Eliot poems there seems to be little escape from the everyday urban life of drudgery: you get up, you go to work, you come home, you sleep (or try to), you do it all again the next day. This picture of urban life makes 'Preludes' an important precursor - indeed, prelude - to T. S. Eliot's later poem The Waste Land.
6. 'East Coker'.
This is one of the Four Quartets, which some critics - including Helen Gardner (who features in our pick of the best books about Eliot's poetry) - have branded Eliot's masterpiece.

We could have included Four Quartets as a poem in its own right, but the sequence can also be viewed as a collection of four individual pieces. This is the second poem in the sequence, named after the small village in Somerset from which Eliot's ancestors hailed. (Andrew Elliott had left East Coker for New England in the late seventeenth century; he was one of the judges at the Salem 'witch' trials of 1692.)

Eliot also quotes from his sixteenth-century ancestor Thomas Elyot in the poem. The image (right) is of St Michael's Church, where Eliot's ashes are interred. Here is a recording of Eliot reading the poem.
5. 'Journey of the Magi'.
This was the first of Eliot's popular Christmas poems, which he composed for special booklets/greetings cards published by the company he worked for, Faber and Faber. According to the poet himself, Eliot wrote the poem one Sunday after church (he converted to Christianity in 1927, the same year he wrote this), supposedly after imbibing half a bottle of gin. Told from the perspective of one of the Magi or 'wise men' visiting the infant Christ, the poem examines the implications that the advent of Christ had for the other religions of the time.
4. 'Little Gidding'.
The final of the four poems that make up Four Quartets, this one is named after a small village in Cambridgeshire which was the centre of a church community established by Nicholas Ferrar in the seventeenth century (and not, as one French critic believed, the name of a little boy the poet knew). History does not reside solely in the past, but in the present, at a place like Little Gidding where the traditions of seventeenth-century high Anglicanism are kept alive.

This is close to what Eliot argued about poetic tradition in 'Tradition and the Individual Talent': the modern poet and the poets of ages past coexist, in the here and now. So it is with 'Little Gidding' itself, in the last analysis: it is a poem about traditions in the present, and a present-day poem that absorbs past traditions. The poem did, as Eliot said, set a crown upon his lifetime's effort. After this, he would never write another great poem.

We have analysed this poem here.
3. 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'.
The poem that launched Eliot's career, this dramatic monologue spoken by the indecisive middle-aged Prufrock was first published in the magazine Poetry in 1915. It then opened Eliot's first published volume of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations, in 1917 - although amazingly, the original print run (500 copies) of this volume wouldn't sell out for five years.

Previously, one poetry bookseller had rejected the poem on the grounds that it was 'absolutely insane': Harold Monro, an influential publisher and owner of the Poetry Bookshop in London, was offered the chance to publish 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'. He flung it back, labelling it 'insane', as Peter Ackroyd records in his lucid and informative biography . Prufrock attends social events (almost certainly in New England, such as in the Massachusetts area which Eliot knew well from his time studying at Harvard), probably in the hopes of finding a woman he can court and then marry.

Prufrock talks of an 'overwhelming question' but does not state what this is (he tells us, or his unseen companion, not to ask 'What is it?', so we're left to ponder what this 'question' might be - perhaps 'popping the question', i.e. asking a woman to marry him). He is indecisive, anxious, self-conscious (he worries that the women are muttering behind his back about his thinning hair) - perhaps a bit like the famously indecisive and delaying Prince Hamlet from Shakespeare's play, except that Prufrock doesn't consider himself important enough to be compared to Hamlet ('No! I am not Prince Hamlet ...'). He's a bit-part actor or walk-on part ... even in his own life.

Listen to Eliot reading the poem here. We offer our analysis of it in a separate post.
2. 'The Hollow Men'.
Published in 1925, 'The Hollow Men' was something of a transitional poem for Eliot, coming between the success of The Waste Land (see below) and Eliot's later, more religiously oriented poetry such as Ash-Wednesday and Four Quartets. Part of the poem is recited in the 1979 film Apocalypse Now, which is quite apt since that film was a retelling of Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness, the book that provided Eliot with the epigraph for 'The Hollow Men'.

We have analysed this poem here.
1. The Waste Land.
Probably Eliot's most famous work, this long poem is also, for our money, his best - though many devotees of Four Quartets would disagree. Although not the first long modernist poem written in response to WWI - Ford Madox Ford's 'Antwerp' should probably get that title - Eliot's would become the most definitive.

The original title of the poem was 'He Do the Police in Different Voices' (a quotation Eliot took from Dickens's novel Our Mutual Friend), suggesting the polyvocal nature of the poem (it contains quotations from numerous other poets and playwrights, and even Wagner's operas are quoted). The first recorded use of the word 'moan' to mean 'grumble or complain' is found in Eliot's original drafts of the poem, which were originally twice as long as the final poem that was published.

The opening line to the original draft was 'First we had a couple of feelers down at Tom's place', which isn't quite as memorable as 'April is the cruellest month' (which is the first line of the final version - or rather, almost the first line, since the word 'breeding' follows it). This transformation was thanks largely to Eliot's friend and fellow poet Ezra Pound, who helped to edit the poem (in thanks, Eliot dedicated it to him). ' Complimenti, you bitch. I am wracked by the seven jealousies,' Pound said to Eliot when the poem was finished. He had written a masterpiece - a poem that would go on to be one of the most influential poems written in English in the twentieth century.

Indeed, we include The Waste Land in our pick of the definitive works of modernist literature and have analysed The Waste Land in a series of posts. Here's our founder, Dr Oliver Tearle of Loughborough University, discussing the poem in a short documentary.

If you enjoyed this post, you might also enjoy our five fascinating facts about Eliot - including the everyday swear word he is credited with being the first to use in writing, and the rather unusual ways he liked to break up board meetings at Faber and Faber. Or, for a more detailed summary of Eliot's life, see our interesting biography of T. S. Eliot. For more poetry suggestions, check out our pick of Gerard Manley Hopkins's best poems, seven of Dylan Thomas's greatest poems, and ten of the best Robert Burns poems.
The author of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English at Loughborough University. He is the author of, among others, The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers' Journey Through Curiosities of History and The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem. Image: St. Michael's Church, East Coker, Somerset; © Oliver Tearle, 2014.

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10 T. S. Eliot Poems Everyone Should Read

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T. S. Eliot's greatest poems selected by Dr Oliver Tearle T. S. Eliot is widely regarded as one of the most important poets of the last hundred years. Here at Interesting Literature we're devoted fans of his work, and this got us thinking: which ten defining poems would we recommend to people who want to read him?...

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Prufrock and Other Observations (1917)T.S. Eliot

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Prufrock and Other Observations (1917)T.S. Eliot

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Eliot's first important work, the collection of poems

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Prufrock and Other Observations by T.S. Eliot

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Eliot's first collection is most notable for its title poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", which is often seen as the axe which decapitated Georgian poetry. Also important

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Tradition and the Individual Talent (1920)By T. S. Eliot 

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Tradition and the Individual Talent (1920)By T. S. Eliot 

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In English writing we seldom speak of tradition, though we occasionally apply its name in deploring its absence. We cannot refer to "the tradition" or to "a tradition"; at most, we employ the adjective in saying that the poetry of So-and-so is "traditional" or even "too traditional." Seldom, perhaps, does the word appear except in a phrase of censure. If otherwise, it is vaguely approbative, with the implication, as to the work approved, of some pleasing archaeological reconstruction. You can hardly make the word agreeable to English ears without this comfortable reference to the reassuring science of archaeology.

Certainly the word is not likely to appear in our appreciations of living or dead writers. Every nation, every race, has not only its own creative, but its own critical turn of mind; and is even more oblivious of the shortcomings and limitations of its critical habits than of those of its creative genius. We know, or think we know, from the enormous mass of critical writing that has appeared in the French language the critical method or habit of the French; we only conclude (we are such unconscious people) that the French are "more critical" than we, and sometimes even plume ourselves a little with the fact, as if the French were the less spontaneous. Perhaps they are; but we might remind ourselves that criticism is as inevitable as breathing, and that we should be none the worse for articulating what passes in our minds when we read a book and feel an emotion about it, for criticizing our own minds in their work of criticism. One of the facts that might come to light in this process is our tendency to insist, when we praise a poet, upon those aspects of his work in which he least resembles any one else. In these aspects or parts of his work we pretend to find what is individual, what is the peculiar essence of the man. We dwell with satisfaction upon the poet's difference from his predecessors, especially his immediate predecessors; we endeavour to find something that can be isolated in order to be enjoyed. Whereas if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously. And I do not mean the impressionable period of adolescence, but the period of full maturity.

Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, "tradition" should positively be discouraged. We have seen many such simple currents soon lost in the sand; and novelty is better than repetition. Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to any one who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity.

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not onesided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities.

In a peculiar sense he will be aware also that he must inevitably be judged by the standards of the past. I say judged, not amputated, by them; not judged to be as good as, or worse or better than, the dead; and certainly not judged by the canons of dead critics. It is a judgment, a comparison, in which two things are measured by each other. To conform merely would be for the new work not really to conform at all; it would not be new, and would therefore not be a work of art. And we do not quite say that the new is more valuable because it fits in; but its fitting in is a test of its value-a test, it is true, which can only be slowly and cautiously applied, for we are none of us infallible judges of conformity. We say: it appears to conform, and is perhaps individual, or it appears individual, and many conform; but we are hardly likely to find that it is one and not the other.

To proceed to a more intelligible exposition of the relation of the poet to the past: he can neither take the past as a lump, an indiscriminate bolus, nor can he form himself wholly on one or two private admirations, nor can he form himself wholly upon one preferred period. The first course is inadmissible, the second is an important experience of youth, and the third is a pleasant and highly desirable supplement. The poet must be very conscious of the main current, which does not at all flow invariably through the most distinguished reputations. He must be quite aware of the obvious fact that art never improves, but that the material of art is never quite the same. He must be aware that the mind of Europe-the mind of his own country-a mind which he learns in time to be much more important than his own private mind-is a mind which changes, and that this change is a development which abandons nothing en route, which does not superannuate either Shakespeare, or Homer, or the rock drawing of the Magdalenian draughtsmen. That this development, refinement perhaps, complication certainly, is not, from the point of view of the artist, any improvement. Perhaps not even an improvement from the point of view of the psychologist or not to the extent which we imagine; perhaps only in the end based upon a complication in economics and machinery. But the difference between the present and the past is that the conscious present is an awareness of the past in a way and to an extent which the past's awareness of itself cannot show.

Some one said: "The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did." Precisely, and they are that which we know.

I am alive to a usual objection to what is clearly part of my programme for the métier of poetry. The objection is that the doctrine requires a ridiculous amount of erudition (pedantry), a claim which can be rejected by appeal to the lives of poets in any pantheon. It will even be affirmed that much learning deadens or perverts poetic sensibility. While, however, we persist in believing that a poet ought to know as much as will not encroach upon his necessary receptivity and necessary laziness, it is not desirable to confine knowledge to whatever can be put into a useful shape for examinations, drawing-rooms, or the still more pretentious modes of publicity. Some can absorb knowledge, the more tardy must sweat for it. Shakespeare acquired more essential history from Plutarch than most men could from the whole British Museum. What is to be insisted upon is that the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past and that he should continue to develop this consciousness throughout his career.

What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

There remains to define this process of depersonalization and its relation to the sense of tradition. It is in this depersonalization that art may be said to approach the condition of science. I, therefore, invite you to consider, as a suggestive analogy, the action which takes place when a bit of finely filiated platinum is introduced into a chamber containing oxygen and sulphur dioxide.

II

Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation are directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry. If we attend to the confused cries of the newspaper critics and the susurrus of popular repetition that follows, we shall hear the names of poets in great numbers; if we seek not Blue-book knowledge but the enjoyment of poetry, and ask for a poem, we shall seldom find it. I have tried to point out the importance of the relation of the poem to other poems by other authors, and suggested the conception of poetry as a living whole of all the poetry that has ever been written. The other aspect of this Impersonal theory of poetry is the relation of the poem to its author. And I hinted, by an analogy, that the mind of the mature poet differs from that of the immature one not precisely in any valuation of "personality," not being necessarily more interesting, or having "more to say," but rather by being a more finely perfected medium in which special, or very varied, feelings are at liberty to enter into new combinations.

The analogy was that of the catalyst. When the two gases previously mentioned are mixed in the presence of a filament of platinum, they form sulphurous acid. This combination takes place only if the platinum is present; nevertheless the newly formed acid contains no trace of platinum, and the platinum itself is apparently unaffected; has remained inert, neutral, and unchanged. The mind of the poet is the shred of platinum. It may partly or exclusively operate upon the experience of the man himself; but, the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material.

The experience, you will notice, the elements which enter the presence of the transforming catalyst, are of two kinds: emotions and feelings. The effect of a work of art upon the person who enjoys it is an experience different in kind from any experience not of art. It may be formed out of one emotion, or may be a combination of several; and various feelings, inhering for the writer in particular words or phrases or images, may be added to compose the final result. Or great poetry may be made without the direct use of any emotion whatever: composed out of feelings solely. Canto XV of the Inferno (Brunetto Latini) is a working up of the emotion evident in the situation; but the effect, though single as that of any work of art, is obtained by considerable complexity of detail. The last quatrain gives an image, a feeling attaching to an image, which "came," which did not develop simply out of what precedes, but which was probably in suspension in the poet's mind until the proper combination arrived for it to add itself to. The poet's mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.

If you compare several representative passages of the greatest poetry you see how great is the variety of types of combination, and also how completely any semi-ethical criterion of "sublimity" misses the mark. For it is not the "greatness," the intensity, of the emotions, the components, but the intensity of the artistic process, the pressure, so to speak, under which the fusion takes place, that counts. The episode of Paolo and Francesca employs a definite emotion, but the intensity of the poetry is something quite different from whatever intensity in the supposed experience it may give the impression of. It is no more intense, furthermore, than Canto XXVI, the voyage of Ulysses, which has not the direct dependence upon an emotion. Great variety is possible in the process of transmutation of emotion: the murder of Agamemnon, or the agony of Othello, gives an artistic effect apparently closer to a possible original than the scenes from Dante. In the Agamemnon, the artistic emotion approximates to the emotion of an actual spectator; in Othello to the emotion of the protagonist himself. But the difference between art and the event is always absolute; the combination which is the murder of Agamemnon is probably as complex as that which is the voyage of Ulysses. In either case there has been a fusion of elements. The ode of Keats contains a number of feelings which have nothing particular to do with the nightingale, but which the nightingale, partly, perhaps, because of its attractive name, and partly because of its reputation, served to bring together.

The point of view which I am struggling to attack is perhaps related to the metaphysical theory of the substantial unity of the soul: for my meaning is, that the poet has, not a "personality" to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways. Impressions and experiences which are important for the man may take no place in the poetry, and those which become important in the poetry may play quite a negligible part in the man, the personality.

I will quote a passage which is unfamiliar enough to be regarded with fresh attention in the light-or darkness-of these observations:

And now methinks I could e'en chide myself
For doating on her beauty, though her death
Shall be revenged after no common action.
Does the silkworm expend her yellow labours
For thee? For thee does she undo herself?
Are lordships sold to maintain ladyships
For the poor benefit of a bewildering minute?
Why does yon fellow falsify highways,
And put his life between the judge's lips,
To refine such a thing-keeps horse and men
To beat their valours for her? . . .

In this passage (as is evident if it is taken in its context) there is a combination of positive and negative emotions: an intensely strong attraction toward beauty and an equally intense fascination by the ugliness which is contrasted with it and which destroys it. This balance of contrasted emotion is in the dramatic situation to which the speech is pertinent, but that situation alone is inadequate to it. This is, so to speak, the structural emotion, provided by the drama. But the whole effect, the dominant tone, is due to the fact that a number of floating feelings, having an affinity to this emotion by no means superficially evident, have combined with it to give us a new art emotion.

It is not in his personal emotions, the emotions provoked by particular events in his life, that the poet is in any way remarkable or interesting. His particular emotions may be simple, or crude, or flat. The emotion in his poetry will be a very complex thing, but not with the complexity of the emotions of people who have very complex or unusual emotions in life. One error, in fact, of eccentricity in poetry is to seek for new human emotions to express; and in this search for novelty in the wrong place it discovers the perverse. The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all. And emotions which he has never experienced will serve his turn as well as those familiar to him. Consequently, we must believe that "emotion recollected in tranquillity" is an inexact formula. For it is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor, without distortion of meaning, tranquillity. It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration, of a very great number of experiences which to the practical and active person would not seem to be experiences at all; it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberation. These experiences are not "recollected," and they finally unite in an atmosphere which is "tranquil" only in that it is a passive attending upon the event. Of course this is not quite the whole story. There is a great deal, in the writing of poetry, which must be conscious and deliberate. In fact, the bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious. Both errors tend to make him "personal." Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.

III

δ δε νους ισως Θειοτερον τι και απαθες εστιν

This essay proposes to halt at the frontier of metaphysics or mysticism, and confine itself to such practical conclusions as can be applied by the responsible person interested in poetry. To divert interest from the poet to the poetry is a laudable aim: for it would conduce to a juster estimation of actual poetry, good and bad. There are many people who appreciate the expression of sincere emotion in verse, and there is a smaller number of people who can appreciate technical excellence. But very few know when there is an expression of significant emotion, emotion which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet. The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living.

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Tradition and the Individual Talent by T. S. Eliot

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In English writing we seldom speak of tradition, though we occasionally apply its name in deploring its absence. We cannot refer to "the tradition" or to "a tradition"; at most, we employ the adjective in saying that the poetry of So-and-so is "traditional" or even "too traditional."

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By T. S. Eliot

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Irish nationalism in WB Yeats WB Yeats, an Irish poet and playwright, is one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature with the passionate feeling of Irish Nationalism. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival and, along with Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn had founded the Abbey Theatre, that had made...

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W illiam Butler Yeats (1865-1939) was born in Dublin. His father was a lawyer and a well-known portrait painter. Yeats was educated in London and in Dublin, but he spent his summers in the west of Ireland in the family's summer house at Connaught. The young Yeats was very much part of the fin de siècle in London; at the same time he was active in societies that attempted an Irish literary revival. His first volume of verse appeared in 1887, but in his earlier period his dramatic production outweighed his poetry both in bulk and in import. Together with Lady Gregory he founded the Irish Theatre, which was to become the Abbey Theatre, and served as its chief playwright until the movement was joined by John Synge. His plays usually treat Irish legends; they also reflect his fascination with mysticism and spiritualism. The Countess Cathleen (1892), The Land of Heart's Desire (1894), Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902), The King's Threshold (1904), and Deirdre (1907) are among the best known.

After 1910, Yeats's dramatic art took a sharp turn toward a highly poetical, static, and esoteric style. His later plays were written for small audiences; they experiment with masks, dance, and music, and were profoundly influenced by the Japanese Noh plays. Although a convinced patriot, Yeats deplored the hatred and the bigotry of the Nationalist movement, and his poetry is full of moving protests against it. He was appointed to the Irish Senate in 1922. Yeats is one of the few writers whose greatest works were written after the award of the Nobel Prize. Whereas he received the Prize chiefly for his dramatic works, his significance today rests on his lyric achievement. His poetry, especially the volumes The Wild Swans at Coole (1919), Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921), The Tower (1928), The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933), and Last Poems and Plays (1940), made him one of the outstanding and most influential twentieth-century poets writing in English. His recurrent themes are the contrast of art and life, masks, cyclical theories of life (the symbol of the winding stairs), and the ideal of beauty and ceremony contrasting with the hubbub of modern life.

This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and first published in the book series Les Prix Nobel. It was later edited and republished inNobel Lectures. To cite this document, always state the source as shown above.
William Butler Yeats died on January 28, 1939.

To cite this section
MLA style: William Butler Yeats - Biographical. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Prize Outreach AB 2023. Wed. 5 Apr 2023. <https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1923/yeats/biographical/>

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W illiam Butler Yeats (1865-1939) was born in Dublin. His father was a lawyer and a well-known portrait painter. Yeats was educated in London and in Dublin, but he spent his summers in the west of Ireland in the family's summer house at Connaught.

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interviews made for television recording the personal memories of women and men who took part in the Easter Rising.

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Personal accounts from those who took part in the Rising, British soldiers sent to Ireland during Easter Week and colour film of the 1966 commemoration events.

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BBC

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BBC - History - 1916 Easter Rising - Aftermath - The Anglo-Irish War

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BBC history site about the Anglo-Irish war, resulting from the 1916 Easter Rising in Ireland

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Introduction, recital and analysis of the poem

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Introduction, recital and analysis of the poem

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1916 Easter Rising: Awakening | History Documentary (Episode 1/3) HD

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RTE Documentary narrated by Liam Neeson about the 1916 Easter Rising.

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Romanticism