YEATS’S ATTITUDE TO OLD AGE

YEATS’S ATTITUDE TO OLD AGE
One of Yeats’s concerns in his later poetry was old age and what it brought with it. Among other things, old age is seen as a symbol of the tyranny of time. At the same time rage against the limitations of age and society that is put upon an old man keep occurring again and again in his poetry.
One of Yeats’s personal poems, The Tower begins with these lines.
What shall I do with this absurdity?
O Heart, O troubled heart –this caricature.
Decrepit age that has been tied to me
As to a dog’s tail
A few stanzas later in the same poem Yeats asks the rhetorical question.
Did all old men and women, rich and poor,
Who trod upon these rocks or passed this door,
Whether in public or in secret rage
As I do now against old age?
The above lines from Yeats’s poems make it sufficiently clear that Yeats did detest old age. In the poem “The Tower” itself, he sees the fact of old age as a sort of battered kettle at the heel? In another poem, “Among School Children” , he sees himself as a comfortable kind of old scarecrow.
A powerful expression of Yeats’s anguish in the face of old age appears at the beginning of his famous poem “Sailing to Byzantium”.
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
Those dying generations—at their song.
In the next stanza he talks of the limited alternatives available to an old man, who, to Yeats is no more than a tattered coat upon a stick:
An aged man is but a paltry thing.
A tattered coat upon a stick. Unless,
Soul claps its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Many other poems talk of old age. In the poem, The Spur, Yeats wonders why people object to his retaining lust and rage even in old age. After all, they have always been the motivating force behind his poetry. In the poem “The Wild Old Wicked Men” Yeats says:
But a coarse old man am I,
I choose the second-best,
I forger it all a while
Upon a woman’s breast.
“In An Acre of Grass” Yeats claims that despite old age, he has a right to experience the whole of life, to “pierce the clouds or shake the dead in their shrouds”. In the poem, Politics, he laments the loss of his youth.
Then there is the poem “A Man Young and Old” Yeats’s nostalgia for the of youth is expressed.
Another poem which has a very suggestive title and talks of old age is “Why Should Not Old Men Be Mad”.
Old age and what it brings with it are a recurring theme in Yeats’s poetry and they are responsible for some of the best and most poignant and passionate poetry that came for his pen.

W.B.YEATS: A Modern Poet

W.B.YEATS: A Modern Poet
W.B.Yeats is a unique poet as he is a traditional as well as modern poet at the same time. T.S. Eliot once said, “Certainly, for the younger poets of England and America, I am sure that their admiration for Yeats’s poetry has been wholly good”. But though Yeats was traditional in his views and very Irish in his outlook, he was a modern poet all the same. Although he started his career as a reflection of the romantics and the Pre-Raphaelites, he very soon evolved into a genuine modern poet. Thus, Yeats is a poet who is both traditional and modern.
The early poetry of W.B Yeats is not realistic. Even in his later poems, despite diction Yeats is till not free from the spell of the fairies, ghosts, magic and the mysterious world. He is indeed the last romantic. But the poetry in specially the last two phases is very realistic.
The pessimistic note is the hallmark of modern poetry; Yeats’s poetry, like that of Eliot and some of the other modern poets is marked with pessimism and disillusionment. To A shade, When Helen Lived, and The Byzantium poems reflects this mood. The last two lines from the poem To A Shade will illustrate this:
You had enough of sorrow before death
Away, away; you are safer in the tomb.
Although the modern age is essentially a scientific age, yet modern poetry has traces of mysticism and religion in it. Yeats is perhaps the one modern poet who built up a system of thought based on the occult and mystic religion and whose poetry was the direct outcome of it. The last poems of Yeats are steeped in mysticism. A dialogue of Self and Soul is in a way a debate between ‘Atma’ and ‘Maya’.
Modern poetry has often been described as being very complex and obscure, and it is not at all surprising that Yeats’s poems have been dubbed as some of the most obscure and complex poems. Yeats’s adoption of poetic person or ‘Mask’ made his poems difficult to understand. But what made his poems (and even his plays) very complex and obscure is the ‘system of symbolism’ which he had built up in A Vision.
Yeats may be regarded as a link between the decadent aestheticism of the nineties and a new realism of the modern age. The romanticism, the mythology and the vague music of his early work are no longer to be found in his later poems.
The Nobel Prize for literature given to Yeats in 1923 confirmed him as a great modern poet.

W.B.YEATS

YEATS’S THEORY OF POETRY
Yeats’s theory of poetry is of great importance for a full understanding of his own poems. In the early stage of his poetic career he believed in the theory of “art for life’s sake”. He was in full agreement with his father that dramatic poetry was to be preferred because it was clear and sharp in outline, while the lyric was vague and blurred. However his genius was lyrical and it penetrates even his dreams which are essentially lyrical.
But in the nineties he became the advocate of “art for art’s sake.”He started to write “pure poetry”, a poetry from which all the exterior decorations had been done away with. In the last phase of his poetry Yeats tried to reconcile art with life. In his later poetry we get a nice fusion. Yeasts believed that “literature is always personal, always one man’s vision of the world, one man’s experiences”. But he also believed that there must be a fusion of the impersonal with the personal, of the objective with the subjective before really great poetry could be born. A poet to him was essentially a visionary who must remain true to his vision. Poetry to him was “the commonsense of the soul: it distinguishes greatness from triviality, mere fancifulness from beauty that lights up the deeps of thought”.