William Butler Yeats’ poetic genius slowly and steadily developed and Yeats reached the highest echelon of success. T.S. Eliot admired his ceaseless development poetic talent. He says “I can think of no poet not even the greatest who has shown a longer period of development than Yeats”. W.B. Yeats was one of the great modern poets remembered for his poetic feats. He influenced the English poets for more than four decades. The poems that made him famous were his visionary and romantic lyrics. The Lake Isle of Innisfree. The sorrow of love and when you are old are his memorable lyrics.
The young Yeats was in touch with the genuine living folk culture of mythology which had not grown state and hackneyed. Yeats had the same fascination for mythology as had the man of renaissance. True, he was deeply absorbed in mythology and he made it a part of imaginative life as Milton absorbed the Hebrew’s sages and Keats’ the great myths. His early lyrics includes exquisite example of strange lyricism. W.B. Yeats in his visionary and dreamy periods always preferred the world of the poetic imagination to the world of the stank realities. In his famous poems The Wing Among The Reeds and The Shadow Waters, Yeats is making the voice within and with drawing as much as possible from the contemporary world. The religion also served his purpose as a means to purify and intensify his feelings. His poetry is a poetry of suggestions. Yeats’ poetic genius is seen in his significant immaculate use of symbolism. And no wonder Yeats’ symbolism has the magic of song and it is not deemed by any prosaic moralizing. His symbolism is connected with a belief in cult influences and magic. The Happy Town Hand is a farewell to symbolism. This poem is a turning point in Yeats’ poetic development.
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Yeats’ philosophical poem The Doll is of great significance. Yeats left the fiery land and after the year 1919 many notable poems came out from his brooding upon the bloody violence of the civil war. The Easter Rebellion, The Civil War, The Harm Oil in Ireland, all these important events figure in his poetry. In The Second Coming the power of the seen (GOD) come upon and he prophesized the dawn of perilous civilization. The horror of these dragon ridden day weighted upon him but he couldn’t depressed him. The sailing to Byzantium and Byzantium are the important memorable poems of W.B. Yeats.
Like Hopkins he succeeded in over coming the modern crises by means of integration of personality. But he achieved that integration at the expense of losing grasp of the more complex world. The consciousness of failure to achieve that larger unity of life which he had dreamt tends a strange pathos to the noble epitaph which Yeats composed for himself, “Cast a cold eye on life, on death horseman pass by”.
Among the modern poets Yeats is admired for his myriad qualities. He is remembered for his lyrical genius and for his use of symbols and for his realistic attitude to the growing problems of the world. In most of his early poems. The Shelleyan fluidity and Keats’ sensuousness permeate throughout his poems. Significantly, the symbols used by Yeats from his ‘Spiritus mundi’ so, his genre of his poetic style. What is more, his symbols are meaningful. The very common symbol in his poetry is the moon which stands for life’s mystery.
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