Life and Nature - Scf - State College of Florida

W.B. Yeats
The turning point from Irish nationalism to mythology, mysticism, and spiritualism started
after Yeats began to believe in the “collective unconscious” by Carl Jung, which branches from
“stream of consciousness.” Jung and Yeats believed “collective unconsciousness” was “a sort of
universal memory shared by all human beings” (1172). Religion began coming back into Yeats‟ life
after discovering this term because he had the notion “that the poet, like the priest, the prophet,
and the magician, tapped into the collective unconscious” and could move his audience through
symbols (1172). Art, including poetry, should involve a quasi-religious function. He declared that
he “made a new religion, almost an infallible church of poetic tradition” (qtd. in Booth 1172).
As for his writing styles and works, Yeats “eschewed the free verse popular with his
contemporaries… [and] experimented with various meters and verse forms, ranging from ballad
stanza to ottava rima” (1172). Ballad stanzas, known as quatrains, are frequently found in folk
ballads. Ottava rima is an Italian rhyming stanza form consisting of eight lines in iambic
pentameter. These different shifts can be found in multiple poems, such as “The Lake Isle of
Innisfree” (1890) from his early works, to mid works such as “All Things Can Tempt Me” (1910)
and “Easter 1916” (1916), to later works like “Leda and the Swan” (1923), “Sailing to
Byzantium” (1923), and “Byzantium” (1927). Many poets like Emily Dickenson and Henry
Thoreau became famous and were awarded for it after they had died, but by the age 58, Yeats
had already won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923 “for his always inspiring poetry, which in a
highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation” (qtd. in “The Nobel Prize in
Literature 1923”). On January 28, 1939, W.B. Yeats passed away in Menton, France. He was
initially buried at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin in France, but was moved to Drumcliffe, County
Sligo in eastern Ireland in 1948.