Patterns of Belief Myth in the Poetry of William Butler Yeats

The poetry of William Butler Yeats may best be described as one that combines individual poems in order to form a single mythological narrative in which there are several levels of meaning. But at the same time the poetry falls conveniently, according to this treatment of or his attitude towards myth, into two distinct periods. There is, of course, the early period, ending sometime between 1915 and. 1917, the years during which, it appears, he began work on A Vision. The poetry written then consists largely of materials borrowed from Irish story and medieval romance, the pre-Raphaelite writers, Shelley, Blake, the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century mystics, and the decadent writers who were in close touch with the French symbolist movement. In this period Yeats intuitively perceived or made allusive reference to mythological concepts. Or, more directly through the use of Celtic tales of Fenian and Red Branch, he availed himself of already established tradition. After 1917, but never completely divorcing himself from the major tendencies of his early years, he shifted his emphasis to an interest in classical literature, the Irish patriots and writers of the eighteenth century, John Donne and the metaphysical poets, the neo-Platonists, and the Byzantine Empire. At this time, the last twenty years of his life, he turned from primarily an intuitive to a more explicit use of mythological devices and allegory. Now he relied for thought and image on a strangely fabricated metaphysical system. “The Wanderings of Oisin” , the most characteristic poem of his young manhood, and A Vision , the essay in which for the first time he disclosed the fundamental aspects of his later