Yeatss career is maybe the most famous one in the modern poetry a career that has been seen as a representative story about modern poetry as a whole. A story in which Yeats begins his career as a romantic visionary and a late 19th century aesthete, and who under the pressure of the political and social crises breaks with the artificial rhetoric of his early poems and becomes, as some would argue, a kind of heroic realist. That development can be understood as a transition from one set of symbols to another.Yeatss poetic identity is forged through identification with the heroic characters of his poems, characters who are sometimes surrogates for the poets such as King Goll, The warrior Cuchulan, or who are sometimes simply version of the poet himself, that is the poet rendering himself in stylized roles Yeats the public man, Yeats the lover, Yeats the mad old man. Therefore, Yeats is always creating himself in his poems and creating himself as a version of a type, and he does the same thing to those around him. Famously to his lover Maud Gonne who becomes Helena of Troy (No second Troy and other poems), the martyrs of the Eastern Rebellion in 1916 become ancient Irish warriors. Of course, there is more of this myth making imagination which Yeats is always working with.His poetry may therefore be considered autobiographical so to speak. He treated his life as art; raising the particularities of his experience into general symbols, working the narrative of his life into myth. In Yeatss poems people are always particulars fitted into certain types, new versions of old identities, who travel across time. In a certain sense, Yeats felt like he was King Goll from his poem, a mythical Irish ruler who goes mad in the heat of the battle, becomes distracted by an inward fire that draws him into the woods where he wanders and sings, full of unfulfilled desire. Finally, he destroys his harp. This story is a certain version of Yeats's own early ambition to become a particular kind of figure - not an Irish king but an Irish poet, which would mean consolidating in himself a sense of national identity and explaining that identity, representing it, embodying it in all senses; representing and embodying Irishness, for an English speaking readership in Ireland, but also in England and elsewhere. The nationality of that identity is important; that is, Yeats's Irishness, and so is Yeats's audience. His ambition is to become the first major Irish poet writing in English. The poetry of the early phase of his career was punctuated by simple poems in the Irish folk tradition and was thematically imbued with basic dichotomy in the Universe. Therefore the imagery of these poems is arranged in pairs of contrast: man and Nature, the human world (mundane) and the fairy world (supernatural), the domestic and the adventurous, the temporal and the eternal, the phenomenal and the noumenal. His early poetry is a unique blend of both classical and Celtic mythology put in a context of neo-Platonic thought. It is in The Wind Among the Reeds (1899) that those mystical speculations of Yeatss are very much in evidence. He believed that there are no barriers between our minds, that there are actually no different, separate minds but one universal Great mind or Great Memory as a concoction of all minds in the world. And that concept is understood that wherever you are and whoever you are you can understand symbols used in his poetry. This is the point at which his poetic shifts from romanticism to tenuous, intelligible symbolism. Yeats once said that he wanted the natural words in the natural order, but he had a very highly cultured sense of what is natural, and his poetry is full of verbal archaism. It's characterized by a kind of high, formal bearing. It has a careful decorum, a kind of high sheen, especially this early poetry. Metrically, Yeats's attitudes result in a kind of superb regularity. In the early Yeats you find smooth, unbroken lines, a diction that's elegant and seemingly easy, without ever deigning to seem merely colloquial. The sound of Yeats was, and was meant to be, seductive. The poems are, in fact, very often about kinds of seduction a child, a king, the poet, these figures are drawn away from society or from family towards secret, sacred places, magical places of love that are frequently imaged in these poems as an island or the center of a wood; in short, places of privacy that shut the world out and that stand for Yeats's ideal of poetic autonomy, his desire to create and inhabit self-sufficient, imaginative worlds. "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," "Who Goes with Fergus?", "The Hosting of the Sidhe": these are all poems that exemplify this idea, and there are many, many more. These poems come from a phase in Yeats's career, the climax of which is the book The Wind Among the Reeds. Some of the poems contained in there are "The Hosting of the Sidhe," "The Song of the Wandering Aengus," and other famous poems from Yeats's early career.When I said that there's a story about Yeats's career that makes him out to be an exemplary modern poet, I had in mind how over the course of this long career he leaves behind him that idealized world of late nineteenth-century art for a more fully human, realist poetry, one that, rhetorically, strips away Yeats's own poeticisms and locates his subjects in contemporary politics and history. This was the kind of generalized story of Yeats's career. Pound Ezra Pound is Yeats's younger friend. Pound, you'll see, keeps turning up in all of these stories. He had a role in pushing Yeats in the direction in which he went. He had also a big role in publicizing Yeats's development. His poetry undergoes a certain change and becomes a perfect blend of mythological material, irony, epigrammatic expression, and beautiful verse. His association with the Abbey Theater at this time brought him very much down to earth; wrestling with practical problems gave his verse a controlled bitterness which will resonate throughout the collection called Responsibilities (1914). The best representative of that controlled bitterness is certainly the poem The Coat in which embittered, Yeats makes almost a statement that he is giving up his earlier manner of expression, precisely because it seems as disguise, because it seems misleading; people would only cling to the mythology he is using without fathoming the deeper meaning. The lines from The Fisherman, another poem from Responsibilities, catch Yeatss scorn of an audience (the Dublin middle class and theater-going public) that is unable to recognize true wisdom and great art. Yeats from then on tends to show himself more and more as an enemy of the bourgeois, the Philistine materialists who ruled the commercial life of Dublin and put every obstacle there is in the way of the development of true Irish art and literature. The Fisherman embodies Irish peasantry to whom Yeats turns in scorn of the urban audience who seem to represent a new order of things modernity. Yeats finds the pattern of adequate living in peasantry and aristocracy and this is seen ever more clearly in The Wild Swans at Coole (1919) and Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921), volumes which combine symbolism and realism. The first stanza of The Second Coming is a powerful description of apocalypse, opening with the indelible image of the falcon circling ever higher, in ever-widening spirals, so far that The falcon cannot hear the falconer. The centrifugal impetus described by those circles in the air tends to chaos and disintegrationThings fall apart; the centre cannot hold;and more than chaos and disintegration, to warThe blood-dimmed tideto fundamental doubtThe best lack all convictionand to the rule of misguided evilthe worst / Are full of passionate intensity.The centrifugal impetus of those widening circles in the air, however, is no parallel to the Big Bang theory of the universe, in which everything speeding away from everything else finally dissipates into nothingness. In Yeats mystical/philosophical theory of the world, in the scheme he outlined in his bookA Vision, the gyres areintersectingcones, one widening out while the other focuses in to a single point. History is not a one-way trip into chaos, and the passage between the gyres not the end of the world altogether, but a transition to a new world, or to another dimension.The second section of the poem offers a glimpse into the nature of that next, new world: It is a sphinxa vast image out of Spiritus Mundi... / A shape with lion body and the head of a mantherefore it is not only a myth combining elements of our known world in new and unknown ways, but also a fundamental mystery, and fundamentally alienA gaze blank and pitiless as the sun. It does not answer the questions posed by the outgoing domaintherefore the desert birds disturbed by its rising, representing the inhabitants of the existing world, the emblems of the old paradigm, are indignant. It poses its own new questions, and so Yeats must end his poem with the mystery, his question: what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?It has been said that the essence of great poems is their mystery, and that is certainly true of The Second Coming. It is a mystery, it describes a mystery, it offers distinct and resonant images, but opens itself to infinite layers of interpretation.The poem Leda and the Swan by by William Butler Yeats shows how Leda was being raped by Zeus in the form of a wild swan and how this copulation led to the destruction of the city of the Troy. Zeus who is known to be a very wise god, one day infatuated by her beauty after seeing naked body while she was bathing in the river Furatos and raped her.William Butler YeatsLeda couldnt understand what it was, which came over her body and overpowered her. She staggered to make herself free but all was in vain. The bird caught her nape in his beak and forced her to lie down. He caressed thighs of Leda. He rubbed her breasts with his own body. This union of the human (Leda) with the superhuman (Zeus) led to the birth of the heroes and heroines who created the Athenian civilization. The outcome of the act of this copulation is Helen, who is responsible not only for the Trojan War but also for the death of Agamemnon, who was killed by his wife.The poet wonders that for a woman like Leda, it was impossible to make herself free from that feathered glory. She felt weak against that massive force of Zeus. She started feeling that the bird had already overpowered her and the rape was almost complete. The final question that arises out of the whole episode is whether any positive gains also came out of this sexual act. In another term when Leda was caught up like this, when she was being mastered in this way by the brute blood of the air was she able to take on to herself part of the divine knowledge and power of Zeus before he became indifferent to her? The question Did she put on his knowledge with his power? is rhetorical.The poet ends the poem by suggesting that Leda didnt gain the divine knowledge of the god but his violence. From the questions of the second and the last stanzas of the poem, we also see that not only human beings but also gods themselves are a part of a universal (or cosmic) pattern of events, and that they must play their roles as history unfolds. Yeats believed that the divine power come to the human world once in every two thousand years. Once it comes in the form of a violent animal that forcefully rapes some important woman to give birth to children who will bring about the end of the existing culture and civilization. According to Yeats, the birth of Christ was caused by such an indirect spiritual contact of the divine power with Mary in Jerusalem. Similarly, the birth of the most beautiful woman Helen and her sister Clytemnestra in Greece was caused by a violent rape of the Greek queen Leda by the god Zeus in the form of a swan. The sexual intercourse between Leda and Swan is not only resulted in the birth of Helen and Clytemnestra but also the new era of physical violence and destruction of the old Greek culture.The poem can be seen as a criticism of beauty too. Helen is criticized for lack of wisdom. She left her legitimate husband and eloped with Paris, which was so much devastating that it created havoc all around. Similarly, beautiful Clytemnestra killed her own husband. It is an act which could never be forgiven. Both women had beauty but no knowledge at all. Yeats criticizes a beauty where there is a lack of wisdom. Beauty without knowledge can be devastating and the above poem serves the same example.This sonnet is a powerful description of the union between the human and divine. This poem is a perfect blend of mythological story and Yeatss imaginations about the history. The poem is beautiful in its descriptive narrative of sexual union also.Another poem of birth in which Yeats, (especially in that second strophe), is self-consciously fantastic and speculative. He doesn't insist that the Apocalypse is at hand only that some revelation is. In fact, this poem's power lies, not only its inability but its unwillingness to specify the content of that revelation. Yeasts suggests that we think of this historical moment as the Second Coming. But this is not the return of Jesus that Christianity prophesizes. Yeats sees the Second Coming as an image, as a myth, an idea, a metaphor, a certain stylistic arrangement of experience. It comes out of what he calls Spiritus Mundi, a semi-technical term; Yeats's name for something like the collective unconscious of all peoples, a kind of repertoire of archetypes from which the symbols that we use to understand the world derive.This is really, a radical if not heretical idea for the national poet of a Christian people. Yeats is saying that Christianity is only one symbolic order among others. It has a history. It is now passing away as it once came into being. He is also saying that the birth of Christ in Bethlehem was a nightmare for the world it altered, the world that it changed utterly -- a change that Yeats sees as the end now of the Christian Era and not its fulfillment. There is in there, too, the disturbing suggestion that Christ himself was a rough beast. The Second Coming, it seems, is as Yeats imagines it a kind of similarly uncontrollable mystery, and the energy, the new presence that it releases into the world, is bestial, is that of a beast. The divine enters the human in these poems of Yeats's through the bestial. It's a powerful and disturbing idea. There's another very powerful and disturbing poem that literalizes this idea, and that is "Leda and the Swan,": a poem that is a sonnet, though it doesn't quite look like it at first, a mythological poem that seeks to give a mythological image to or for the kinds of epochal and apocalyptic historical change that Yeats is living through in the 1920s in Ireland. In certain ways, it's a beautiful poem and a grotesque one at the same time. what makes history happen, is imaged here in the form of the rape of the human by the divine in the form of a beast, the form of a swan. The myth that Yeats takes up is of Zeus's rape of the maiden. Leda, whom he attacks as a swan. The offspring that the rape engenders includes Helen, the "terrible beauty" for whom the Trojan War was fought; also Clytemnestra, the wife of the Greek lord Agamemnon whom Clytemnestra murders on his return from Troy. Those future events are glimpsed in the sestet of this poem, in the final six lines. They are, in a sense, compressed and imaged and contained in the rape itself. There's a kind of radical foreshortening of temporal experience at what Yeats images as the orgasmic union of the divine and human -- "a shudder in the loins" -- bringing about the sack of Troy, the murder of the king, all that future contained in this generative, ambiguous violence in the present that the poem describes. In effect, in that middle part of the poem, Yeats collapses creation and destruction, suggesting that the same bestial energy flows through both of these acts. Here, divine force reduces to brute power in somewhat the same way as it does in "The Magi" and "The Second Coming." One result of this is Yeats's -- and this is interesting - his lack of interest in the god. This isn't a poem about Zeus; it's not a poem about the swan. He doesn't name the swan, just as he doesn't name the "rough beast" in "The Second Coming." What the swan thinks or feels or intends doesn't matter. The swan is really only a force, and Yeats's concern is rather with the human experience of that force, which is, again, another manifestation of "terrible beauty." Yeats explores that experience, which is an experience of suffering here and of violation, through a series of rhetorical questions, which are a crucial poetic device for Yeats. Yeats is a poet who asks questions. Questions, well, they're different, even rhetorical questions are different, aren't they, from statements of fact. They're more like propositions, like speculations, that we're asked to test through empathic identification with, in this case, the poem's subject, Leda. This is what the form of the question invites, I think. In "Easter, 1916" I talked about Yeats's partial, complicated identification with the suffering martyrs of that poem. Well, that identification here is re-imagined and we're invited into it, too, troublingly, I think. The frightening experience that Yeats evokes here is the imposition of the divine on the human. "Helpless breast upon... breast": that's a wonderful phrase. The repetition of "breast" links them, makes us see them together, side by side, one on top of the other. It even, I think, identifies the divine and the human, makes them hard to tell apart; binds them, even while we are being confronted with their difference. Leda feels the beating of the swan's heart, and that heart is "strange" to her, that simple, powerful word. The poem's great final question concerns that perception: "Did she put on his knowledge with his power"? Did she know the heart she felt or could she only feel it? What difference would it make between those two things, between knowing that heart and merely feeling it? It's the difference between knowing history -- understanding its patterns and motivating forces, causes, intentions -- and merely feeling it, merely suffering it, serving as its instrument or vessel, an object to be dropped when it's no longer useful. To know history, to be able to put on the god's knowledge with his power, would be to have access to history's meaning, and therefore to be more than merely subject to it, subject to its capricious and violating forces. But Yeats doesn't answer the question, does he? Well, why not? Probably, because there isn't an answer. The further implication is, I think, that whether or not we can have access to historical knowledge, the only path to such knowledge is through submission to its bestial or brute power, which is a kind of shattering experience in this poem

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