Edwardian Era Independent Reading Study Final Paper

Liberated from the Fold The Second Coming, An Irish Airman Forsees His Death, and To a Child Dancing on the Wind; the Poetry of W. B. Yeats Change, specifically the changing of the guard as generations wax and wane, was a fairly common theme for the Edwardian authors. W. B. Yeats’ writing was no exception to this; even in youth, much of his work was concerned with the idea of growing old, and with the idea of that which is old haunting those who are young. He also desired a disruption of the old order, a changing of the contemporary state to suit those who actually had to live with it, rather than those who had established it and faded away.

One of the first things which tends to be mentioned about Yeats is his Irish nationalism; although he was hardly a working class Irish Catholic, and was in fact part of the “Protestant, Anglo-Irish minority” (Poetry Foundation) which considered itself primarily British, he nevertheless grew up embracing his Irish heritage and even being scornful of the British. Much of his poetry is defined by this; he frequently framed it with Irish mythology (Poets.org) and often used it to express sentiments against Ireland remaining under England’s control. A primary example of this is his poem, “An Irish Airman Forsees His Death,” which rather overtly questions the reasoning behind any Irishman fighting or dying in World War I. The other main influence on Yeats’ poetry was his unrequited love for Maud Gonne, an Irish revolutionary, (Poets.org) although this seems to have had less to do with his being an Edwardian poet and more to do with his being a poet.

Yeats’ allusions tend to come in one of two flavors; the first of these is a regional Irish one. In example, the Irish Airman says his country is “Kiltartan Cross” (Yeats, “An Irishman Forsees His Death,” line 5); this means that his country is not Ireland, but Kiltartan Cross, a