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Death poem william butler yeats1/11/2024 This strength of character and courage in the face of prejudice which was noted by Eliot is fundamental to his astonishing achievements. Yeats harangued them from the stage - 'you have disgraced yourselves again' - and he persevered. The Abbey audience, probably the most hyper sensitive in history, rioted - enraged by the portrait of themselves in Synge's The Playboy of the Western World and O' Casey's The Plough and the Stars. Their plays were poetical certainly - romantic? not necessarily. Yeats had a genius - a generous genius for discovering genius in others and amongst those he discovered were two of Ireland's greatest, Synge and O' Casey. In his Nobel speech to the Swedish Academy he chose as his subject ‘The Irish Dramatic Movement ' I would not be here were I not the symbol of that movement.the nationalism we called up was both romantic and poetical.' Well, up to a point. In 1904 Yeats set up the National Theatre of Ireland - The Abbey Theatre with Lady Gregory and he worked unceasingly as playwright and director in its cause. In Irish literature Yeats resembles a tidal wave. This was at a time in Ireland when there was a powerful movement to rescue the Gaelic language. Yeats's book, based on the Fenian cycle, brought Irish mythology to the Irish people in English -'the language' as he pointed out 'in which modern Ireland thinks and does its business’. The publication in 1889 when Yeats was twenty-four of The Wanderings of Osian was a seminal moment, not only in Irish literary history, but also its political history. Indeed Yeats later studied art in Dublin before in one of literature's luckiest volte - face he decided on poetry. His father was a solicitor and he gave up his practice to study painting in London. Yeats learned early that art is what matters. His epitaph? 'Cast a cold eye/ On life, on death/ Horseman, pass by'. He was born in 1865 to John Butler Yeats the son of a rector in the Church of Ireland and to Susan Pollexfen whose shipbuilding family came from Sligo- where Yeats at his request is buried, beneath Ben Bulben's head. Joyce said of him that he had a surrealist imagination few painters could match. The Song of Wandering Aengus, The Stolen Child. He caught it in language which is beautiful and which is dripping in imagery - and, particularly in the early poems - mysticism. 'If a powerful and benevolent spirit has shaped the destiny of this world, we can better gather that destiny through the words that have shaped the heart’s desire of the world.' And that’s exactly what William Butler Yeats did: he caught the heart’s desire.
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