IRISH REBELLION/IRISH RENAISSANCE
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS (1865-1939)

1. Introduction: Yeats as "spiritually hyphenated" Anglo-Irishman.

2. Grouping poems:
Maud Gonne and Ireland
Irish Renaissance, a new aesthetic, and a new phase of history
The waning of the "big house" era
The impending sense of apocalypse

[2029/2098] "No Second Troy" (1908/10)
Structured around four questions:
--Why should I blame her...?
--What could have made her...?
--Why, what could she have done...?
--Was there another Troy...?
Maud Gonne like Helen of Troy but living in a democratizing, unheroic age?

[2031/2104] "Easter 1916" (1916/1920)
Cross-ref: 2031/2104 Yeats; 2850/2836 Boland (Lecture 28)
--Birth of a new culture with a new aesthetic: "a terrible beauty is born"
--First section = life before 1916 is a "casual comedy" in clown costumes (“motley”)
--Second section = commemorates individuals; refuses anonymity of “rebels”
--Third section = the stone image
--Fourth section = transformation of history into myth through poetry

[2033/2101] "The Wild Swans..." (1917)
--Ritual recounting: 1916/51; 1897/32
--What do the swans embody?
--The waning of the "big house" culture
[Try Elizabeth Bowen, The Last September]

[2036/2016]"The Second Coming" (1919/20)
--Occult terminology, the "gyre"
--History as spiral: returns, but never to the same point
--The coming of the Sphinx-like creature
--Apocalypse without divine reckoning