Nel 1887 si trasferì a Londra per studiare arte, dove ben presto cominciò a lavorare per diversi giornali in qualità di illustratore. But now I find that I agree with Eliot “absolutely” when he disdains Keats’ phrase “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty”. One symbol, though arbitrarily selected itself, must make sense in the reality commonly understood by both the poet and every potential reader for it to carry any meaning.
He belonged to the Protestant, Anglo-Irish minority that had controlled the economic, political, social, and cultural life of Ireland since at least the end of the 17th century. Rosenthal seemed to believe that studying Yeats was comparable to preparing yourself for initiation into the Eleusinian Mysteries.No one can deny that Yeats was a remarkable poet who did produce some very fine work, despite it all.
(Id.)
And “the Gate-keepers who drive the nation to war or anarchy that it may find its Image are different from those who drive individual men.” (Id., p. Rather than being dependent on each individual reading, Yeats’s images are fixed. Yeats’s status as a Nobel Laureate was just a precursor of of how silly their prize for Literature looks to us today.Fascinating article, Adam. Engraving on paper, sheet size ...Twenty-four Unframed Works on Paper: Charles Woodbury (American, 1864-1970), Man in Dingy, signed "Charles H. Woodbury" l.l., etching, image size 3 5/8 x 4 in. On the contrary, I referred to close and careful reading of the poem itself as the “literal sense” of the poem, and said it is primary to further interpretations. I am likewise impressed that Yeats attempted drama, even if he did not transcend the achievements of Wilde, Shaw, or O’Casey. All the complexities of mire or blood.” The bird is an intermediary, another spirit-animal, capable of either speaking in the mortal realm or disdaining from on high like the dome. Though “many” have loved—either falsely or truly—her “glad grace” and “beauty,” only one man of those many “loved the pilgrim soul” in her.
They make sense only as assigned by Yeats in the context of Yeats’s elaborate occult worldview. Modernism produces obscure poetry because it denies the existence of absolute truth.
Samuel Butler was bracketed twelfth in the first class of the classical tripos at Cambridge in 1858. I am not even sure what absolute truths they each individually clung to, nor am I much interested in them, unless they add to the understanding of their poetry, which I think, to a certain degree, Mr. Sedia’s analysis does. Truth is not discoverable by the faculties of human reason which everyone possesses, nor does it lie in religious revelation open to everyone’s faith or disbelief.
This is an obvious reference to God, the Monarch that rules the world under the dome of Heaven. I know from my own experience, that I, as but one individual in the present Zeitgeist, am attempting new things, while emphasizing ideals both embraced and not embraced by previous generations.
Too much of this is beyond my immediate ability to absorb – even to dissemble – but it will occupy my mind for a long time. They are the forces dividing the mortal nature from the spirit realm.And as the smithies break the flood of spirits, the “Marbles of the dancing floor / Break bitter furies of complexity.” Yeats identifies the furies this time: “images that yet / Fresh images beget,” all one giant “dolphin-torn and gong-tormented sea.” The world comes apart at the poems end: the “mire and blood” and “fury of complexities” that the bird briefly united come apart and are separately broken, the spirits of “mire and blood” by the Emperor’s smithies and the “fury of complexities” on the marbled dance-floor—the images of the spirit realm unable to penetrate the concreteness of mortal nature.As a whole, the poem presents a series of gyres—death versus life, the mortal realm versus the spiritual, the objective versus the subjective—that whirl and interplay and even combine, yet at the end they come apart and shatter separately as they are confined to their proper spheres and nature is “reset,” presumably for the beginning of another great cycle of lunar phases.To the uninitiated reader, particularly the New Critic, “Byzantium” presents nothing beyond a series of random images couched in very evocative language and flowing, almost musical rhymed meter.