by Maureen Cutajar

Created on: February 13, 2010   Last Updated: February 25, 2010

The early influences of William Butler Yeats were the later Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelites. Yeats’s poetry is a constant attempt to develop his own poetic voice. The Irish poet was constantly trying to adopt his speaking voice to relate to the social and economic issues of his time. Yeats felt the need to speak for his generation and for himself in his poetry and to reveal the truth about both.

In his childhood Yeats learned the heroic Celtic myths and he cared for ancient mythologies rather than the peaceful era of Irish Saints. There was one myth in particular which haunted Yeats throughout his entire life and this was the myth of his hero Cuchulain, who stands for loneliness, for exaltation and for defeat, but who draws his strength from several heroic ages. Cuchulain is the ancient Irish spirit of heroic resistance, of fighting against odds and he represents exceptional bravery; a bravery beyond the odds. Cuchulain is the Irish spirit who fought against the ungovernable seas and he becomes the hero of many of Yeats’s early poems.

In his early years Yeats was a romantic individualist, his early poetry is full of mythical speculation tinged with melancholy and a nostalgia hankering to the past as we find in Tennyson’s poetry. The poet thus becomes the narrator of the Irish legends and wears: “A coat/Covered with embroideries/Out of old mythologies”.

A stimulus that was constant to Yeats’s creative talents was Irish nationalism. Yeats believed that this consciousness of the past might yet unify the people and instil their pride in their national heritage that could lead to a new flowering of art and national life. However, the limitations of the Celtic mythology were all too quickly apparent.

His disillusion is apparent in “A Coat” where his coat that is “Covered with embroideries/Out of old mythologies” is rejected “for there’s more enterprise/In walking naked”. The poetry is thus stripped of all mythology and becomes more direct since the disillusioned poet feels that the Irish are not appreciating his mythological poems.

Yeats turns to a new kind of poetry in “Responsibilities” taking up his Irish responsibilities as a poet and in his poem “To Ireland in the Coming Times” Yeats speaks about his poetic ambitions. His aim is to succeed his predecessors declaring that he wants to become the Oracle of Ireland. Now Yeats starts adopting what Richard Ellman calls the mask. 

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