Yeats' Style

W. B. Yeats is one of the greatest poets of the English language. He had in common two main methods of writing poetry: one spontaneous and the other a laborious process involving much alteration and substitution. However, it was only in the early phase of his poetic career that he relied entirely on inspiration giving himself upto “the chief temptation of the artistic creation without toil”. In the later phase he became a conscious artist who took great pains and re-polish his verse. He was very painstaking artist and tried to say what he has to say in the best possible words. Following lines from “Adams’s Curse” throw valuable side light on his artistic methods:
I said, “All line will take us hours may be;
Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught."
One of the most admirable things about Yeats was that he continued to grow and mature as a craftsman throughout his long poetic career. His early poetry has a dreamy luxuriant style full of sleepy languorous rhythms. The tone is mostly wistful and nostalgic in these poems. There is an abundance of ornate word pictures as in Spenser.

It is a great tribute to Yeats craftsman that he soon grew dissatisfied with verse of this sort and tried to bring his versification nearer to the day to day speech. Along with this he tried to give a new directness and precision to his poetic language. He did away with archaism and poeticism. His imagery also became more definite and accurate and acquired a new pithy quality. Verbiage and superfluity start giving way to vigour and intensity. His diction now became terse and his poetry grew in density.

Simultaneously, Yeats tried to develop what may be called “passionate syntax” and he came to have remarkable skill in modulating his rhythm so as to be in time with the spirit of the poem. This skill is greatly evident in poems like “The Second Coming”, “Sailing to Byzantium”, “The Tower”, “Easter 1916” and “Among School Children” and even in one of his earliest poems “When You are Old”.

The confidence and assurance found in his poetic style in the later years is astounding. His rhythms were very definite and accurate and above all he could now do justice to demands of grandeur and sublimity with effortless ease. His language became very functional. It has now grown trenchant and adaptable to wide range of ideas. When he chooses he can put the starkest facts into the starkest words. As he says in “Sailing to Byzantium”:
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick
Starkest words as used in “Vacillation”:
What theme had Homer but original sin?
He was now able to use poetry for a variety of effects – whether it was exhortation or calm comment, philosophizing or passionate condemnation, lamentation or celebration, nostalgia or prophesy. This does not mean that Yeats’ command over versification and metre was in any way less remarkable during his early poetic career. Even at the time he was able to have close correspondence between the mood of those escapist poems and the language he chose for them. In keeping with the other-worldly atmosphere of his early poetry, his rhythms also were half-entranced. In a collection like “The Wind Among the Reeds” he was able to manipulate wavering and meditative rhythms to great effect.

In his later poetry, again in keeping with his thematic content, Yeats was able to develop subtler, more varied and dramatically more adjustable cadences. His vocabulary had also become more inclusive. As a result, the metaphors were fresher and their range of reference wider. We also find that he employs the metaphorical aphorism. His use of epigram is a properly poetic one, giving the reader a shock of surprise. For example:
Out of Ireland have we come.
Great hatred, little room,
Maimed us at the start.
The imaginative structure of the poem and its actual manifestation came to be more firmly worked out and more spontaneous and natural in effect.


As an artist Yeats continued to mature and grow right upto the end of his poetic career. His confidence and assurance grew more and more and he handled words with perfect ease like a master. However, this very self-assurance accounts for his tendency to indulge in hyperboles and exaggerations. This tendency to exaggerate and use hyperboles has been considered a serious fault in his style by a number of critics. D. S. Savage criticizing this weakness in Yeats’ poetry writes:
This exaggeration and over-heightening, this indulgence in dramatics, is exemplified in the repeated use of hyperboles phrases and of resounding words whose effect is to inflate the meaning.

To sum up Yeats was a conscious and gifted craftsman who has few equals in the whole range of English poetry. It is true that there are some serious faults in his poetry but they do not detract in any way from his true greatness as an artist. He wrote from inner compulsion which gave to his poetry “its peculiar inner glow, as of inspiration, and classes it among our political monuments, if not precisely among “monument of unaging intellect”.

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Irish elements in Yeats' poetry

Although Yeats used Irish mythology in his early poems, yet he is not simply intent to retell the Irish legends. Yeats’ impulse to transcend his folk-lore material is a constant pre-occupation with him. As an Irishman, he is passionately attached to his country by ties of ancestors and pride in his country’s history and legends. He gradually became disillusioned when he felt the violence and hatred of the Irish political leaders.

The use of the inherited subject-matter and the mythology of Ireland were not something educational or poetic in a simple way but something more deeply political.

Yeats is keen to show in a vision something of the face of Ireland. His attempt is to revive the folk art which he considered to be the golden dream of the king and peasant. To Yeats Irish folk tales were one of he principal sources from which the Irish imagination might strengthen itself by drinking from the fountains of tradition.

For Yeats the most powerful influence came from John O’Leary, a great Irish patriot. Yeats himself acknowledged this debt:

It was through the old Ferian leader John O’Leary I found my theme.



Yeats not only lived in the troubled modern era but also lived in a country where trouble was brewing all the time. His poem “September 1913” relates to a municipal controversy in Dublin in the year 1913 which involved for Yeats the dignity of culture in Ireland and the hope for an Irish literary and artistic revival. In this sense, “September 1913” is a pierce attack on the whole city of Dublin. “To a Shade”, one of the most significant Irish poems of Yeats, is addressed to Parnell.

Another great Irish poem is “Easter 1916”. For Yeats Easter uprising of 1916 came to have a great significance. For Yeats, people involved in this uprising had changed everything. The poem shows Yeats’ modified attitude of admiration for the Irish revolutions and martyrs. It is an attempt to move not only into the public world but into a great flow of public world which is called history.
All changed, changed utterly
A terrible beauty is born.
It is an attempt to renew the Irish revolution by restoring its soul. The poem like “The Seven Sages”, also tackles Irish themes. Yeats has been described as a last of the romantics and the first of the moderns. It means he carried both romanticism and modernism. He is an Irish poet. He is very much concerned with Irish history, Irish folk-lore and Irish struggle for independence. Yeats enjoyed the sound of words and used them to create rich texture in his poetry. We notice his use of Irish place-names and the names of figures in Irish legend and history.

At the same time, we must not forget that Yeats’ Irishness was always primarily literary and artistic, much more than political. Yeats’ Irishnesss was thus concerned more with the cultivation of the taste of Irish people than with the struggle of parties group around him.

Yeats’ Nationalism at the same time was liberal and broad based as it is very clear from his repeated attacks on narrow-minded nationalists. Yeats, in fact, gradually moved away from the contemporary fanaticism of Iris politics, but as the poem like “Easter 1916” makes it crystal clear, even in his disillusionment with Irish fanaticism, Yeats never stopped responding quickly and sincerely to the heroism of martyrs, some of whom he may not have liked personally.
What is it but nightfall?
The second section of the poem sketches the personalities of the nationalists before their destruction in the Easter rising. Maud Gonne was one of them, beautiful when young, had spoiled her beauty in the favor of politics agitation. Another was the poet and the school teacher. A third had shown sensitivity and intellectual daring, a fourth has seemed only a drunken vain. The beauty which is born out of these deaths is a terrible beauty.
Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
Yeats’ sense of his own identity and function as a poet began to take shape in the context of Irish nationalism and shows his deliberate and many sided effort to provide the Irish national movement some finer notice than mere hatred of the English.

Yeats complained of the political class in Ireland, the lower middle from which the patriotic associations have drawn their leaders for the past ten years. These people are burning in fire of deep hatred for English.

The poem contains the result of Yeats’ contemplation on the real nature of these people’s sacrifices who last their lives in the Easter uprising of 1916. At the same time Yeats succeed in conveying that the Irish people sacrifices in their freedom struggle were prolonged and spread over a long period.

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Milton: Pandemoniun in "Paradise Lost"

Some angels rushed towards a nearby hill, Pandemonium, a hill not far from there that emerged fire and smoke. All the rest of the hill shone with a bright crust, which was a sure sign that in its interior was buried metallic ore or sulphur. Towards that hill a company of numerous angels moved with great haste like groups of miners, hurrying in advance of the royal army to dig trenches in some battlefield or to build a fortification.

Those angels were guided thither by Mammon. He first taught human beings to pillage the earth, in order to obtain treasures buried. Soon had his companion made a huge opening in the hill and dug out large pieces of gold.

Let nobody feel surprised by the riches that exist in Hell. The soil of Hell perhaps is most appropriate for gold. And here let those who boast of human achievements and who describe, with a feeling of wonder, the Tower of Babel and the Pyramids of Egypt, learn how the greatest monuments, which have been built by human strength and skill and which have become famous, are easily surpassed by the work of worthless Spirits who can do in an hour what countless human beings, with unceasing labour, can hardly accomplish in a long period of time.

Nearby on the plain a second large group angles prepared many cells beneath which burns liquid fire. With wonderful art they melted the massive ore, separating each metal, and skimmed the scum or the impurities. A third group of angels had, with equal promptitude, set up, within the ground, moulds of various kinds and shapes, and filled each hollow recess with the melted gold transported there from the cells by a wonderful device.

Soon out of the earth, a huge structure emerged like a mist. This structure was built like a temple. It was set with round-shaped columns. It had pillars of the Doric style of architecture and the pillars were overlaid with a golden beam. Nor was there lacking cornice or frieze inscribed with sculptures in relief. The roof was carved with gold. Neither Babylon nor Cairo ever attained such splendour in all their glory, even in building temples dedicated to their gods. The rising structure now became complete, having reached its full and impressive height, and at once the doors, opening their brassy leaves, revealed over a wide area within, large spaces on the smooth and level pavement. From the arched roof, many rows of star-like lamps and bright fire-baskets hung as if by some mysterious magic. These lamps were fed with naphtha and asphaltus, and their light fell as if form a sky.

The multitude of angles entered the building hastily, admiring it. Some of them praised the building and some praised the architect. This architect’s sill was known in Heaven by a large number of high buildings, having towers, where angels holding their rods of authority dwelt and sat, like princes whom the supreme ruler, God, had raised to such power and to each of whom He had given the authority to rule according to his status and rank. The name of this architect was also well-known and much respected in ancient Greece; and in Italy he was known by the name of Mulciber. It was told in a fable how this architect had fallen from heaven, having been thrown by angry Jove clean over the bright walls. He had kept falling from morning to noon, and from noon to dewy evening, for the whole of a summer’s day; and with the setting sun he had alighted from the height, like a falling star, on the island of Lemnos in the Aegean sea. Such is the story people relate mistakenly because he, with that rebellious throng of angles, had fallen from Heaven long before that. Nor was it of any use to him now that he had erected building with high towers in Heaven. Not could he escape from his present fate in spite of all his contrivances, but was thrown headlong with his hard-working companion to build a palace for Satan and his followers in Hell.

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Milton: Hell in "Paradise Lost"

This is how Milton describes Hell as Satan sees it after his fall from Heaven:


At once, as far as Angles ken, he views
The dismal situation waste and wild:
A dungeon horrible, on all sides round,
As one great furnace flamed; yet from those flames

No light, but rather darkness visible
Served only to discover sights of woe,
Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace
And rest can never dwell, hope never comes
That comes at all; but torture without end
Still urges, and a fiery deluge, fed
With ever-burning sulphur unconsumed.
Such place Eternal Justice had prepared
For those rebellious; here their prison set,
As fat removed from God and light of Heaven
As from the centre thrice to the utmost pole.
Oh how unlike the place from whence they fell!


This description is brief but vivid and effective. We are to visualize a region which is sinister, barren and wild. The place is a horrible dungeon or pit burning like a huge furnace. Yet from the burning flames comes no light. The flames give out just as much light as is needed to make the darkness visible. The flames of Hell give no light. All around him Satan discerns sights of misery and unhappy dark spaces, where peace and rest can never dwell. It is a place where even hope which comes to all beings, is never felt. This region is far away from God. The contrast between this place and the Heaven conveyed to us is:

Oh how unlike the place from whence they fell!

The place is perpetually afflicted with “floods and whirlwinds of tempestuous fire”.

Thus Milton's Hell is a place of darkness where flickering light of fire serves only to make more dark. Geologically it is a volcanic region, “fed with ever-burning sulphur” in inexhaustible quantities. Satan and his followers have fallen into a “fiery gulf”, a lake that burns constantly with liquid fire. The shore of this lake marks the beginning of a plain to which Satan flies after raising himself from the lake.

----------------------------- till on dry land
He lights—if it were land that ever burned
With solid, as the lake with liquid fire,
And such appeared in hue, as when the force
Of subterranean wind transports a hill
Torn from Pelorus, or the shattered side
Of thundering Aetna, whose combustible
And fuelled entrails thence conceiving fire
Sublimed with mineral fury, aid the winds
And leave a singed bottom al involved
With stench and smoke:


This means that in one case it is “liquid fire”, and in the other “solid fire”. The heat of the land is naturally as intense as is that of the boiling lake. Satan walks uncomfortably over the boiling soil. Heat is everywhere. In the background, we are later told, is a volcanic mountain:


There stood a hill not far, whose grisly top
Belched fire and rolling smoke, the rest entire
Shone with a glossy scurf—undoubted sign
That in his womb was hid metallic ore,
The work of sulphur.


All these description are certainly terrifying. Milton’s object in describing Hell is two-fold; firstly, to indicate the torments which the fallen angels have to endure in contrast to the bliss and joy of Heaven which they have lost for ever; and, secondly, to infuse a feeling of horror in the readers. The modern reader, with his scientific background and scientific notions, may not feel as awed or horrified by these descriptions as readers of Milton’s time might have felt. But even the modern reader has to recognize, not only the graphic quality of the description, but its oppressive and overwhelming effect.

The size of Hell, the nature of its tortures or the degree of heat that Satan feels, such thing can be felt to the reader’s imagination, simulated by words which carry frightening associations for all of us. Hell is a place of absolute darkness, fierce heat, hostile elements and most terrible sight of all, the entire space is “valued with fire”. Its all-enclosing dreadfulness typifies the dwarfing awareness of remorse, distance from God and pain from which its inhabitants cannot escape. Though terrible it is not formless; sea and land exist and from its soil the precious metals are refined which go into the construction of Pandemonium.

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Milton: Character of "Satan"

Satan occupies the most prominent position in the action of Paradise Lost. Though the main theme of the poem is the “Man’s first disobedience” yet it is the character of Satan which gives a touch of greatness to this epic. Al the poetic powers of Milton are shown on the delineation of the majestic personality of the enemy of God and Man, i.e. Satan.

As it is shown in Paradise Lost Book-I that the character of Satan is a blend of the noble and the ignoble, the exalted and the mean, the great and the low, therefore, it becomes difficult to declare him either a hero or a wholly villain.

In Paradise Lost Book-I we can hardly doubt his heroic qualities because this book fully exhibits his exemplary will-power, unsurpassable determination, unshakable confidence and unbelievable courage. However, the encyclopedia of religion removes some of the confusion from our minds regarding Satan’s character in the following words:
Satan means the arch-enemy of men, the adversary of God and of Christianity, a rebel against God, a lost arch-angle.
Milton also confirms the remarks and tells us that Satan is an archangel. When God declares the Holy Christ his viceroy, Satan refuses to accept God’s order because he himself is a confident for it, his false strength and pride leads him to revolt against God for the fulfillment of his lust for power but he and his army suffers a heavy defeat and throw headlong into the pit of hell.

Milton’s description of Satan’s huge physical dimension, the heavy arms he carries, his tower like personality and his gesture make him every inch a hero. In his first speech, Satan tells Beelzebub that he does not repent of what he did and that defeat has brought no change in him at all. He utters memorable lines:

What though the field be lost?
All is not lost – the unconquerable will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield.
Actually he is not ready to bow before the will of God and is determined to wade and eternal war by force and will never compromise. He proudly calls himself the new possessor of the profoundest hell and foolishly claims to have a mind never to be changed by force or time. As he says:
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.
Although Satan undergoes perpetual mental and physical torture in hell yet he is fully satisfied because he is at liberty to do whatever he likes, without any restriction. The following line clearly indicates his concept of freedom.
Better to reign in Hell, the Serve in Heaven.
It can be said without any doubt that Satan gives an evidence of great leadership qualities which are certainly worthy of an epic hero and Beelzebub appreciates him for his undaunted virtues as the commander of undaunted virtue as the commander of fallen angels. His speech to the fallen angels is a sole roof of his great leadership because it infuses a new spirit in the defeated angels who come out of the pit of hill with their swords and are ready to face any danger regardless of their crushing and humiliating defeat at the hands of God. We fully laud Satan’s views on the themes of honour, revenge and freedom, but we cannot help sympathizing him because he embodies evil. He is the embodiment of disobedience to God.

As the poem proceeds, the character of Satan degenerates and he fails to produce any impression to true heroism because he is morally a degraded figure. When we closely examine his addressed to his followers, we find that it is full of contradictions and absurdities, because he tries to throw dust into the eyes of his comrades. In fact, on the one hand, he says that they will provoke war against God and on the other hand, he wants peace which is only possible through submission. Then, on reaching the earth, he enters into a serpent and is completely degrades. Pride is the cause of his fall from Heaven – Pride that has ‘raised’ him to contend with the mightiest. But where is that pride when the Archangel enters into the mouth of a sleeping serpent and hides himself in its “Mazy folds”. Here from the grand figure that he is in the beginning, he degenerates into a man and cunning fellow, and then he tries to tempt Eve by guile. So, Satan degenerates from the role of a brave hero to that of a cunning villain as C. S. Lewis remarks:
From hero to general, from general to politician, from politician to secret service agent, and thence to a thing that peers in at bed-room or bath-room window and thence toad, and finally to a snake – such is the progress of Satan.
So, it can easily be said in the light of above mentioned facts that Satan is out and pouter hero in Book-I of Paradise Lost, but in Book-IX he appears before us every inch a villain because of his evil design and he himself says that his chief pleasure lies in the destruction of mankind which lowers him in our estimation as a hero.

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