W.B. Yeats: Between Myth and Modernism
“Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry,” wrote William Butler Yeats. Few poets of the 20th century quarreled more restlessly with themselves, or their age, than Yeats. At once a national poet of Ireland and a cosmopolitan modernist, Yeats’ career stretched from the Celtic Revival of the 1890s to the brutal upheavals of Irish independence, from dreamy symbolist lyrics to the stark, lapidary lines of The Tower. How did Yeats’s engagement with myth and history, beauty and terror, private desire and collective destiny, help him voice the experience of a generation that was turning in turmoil?
In this course, we will explore Yeats’ poetic, political, and esoteric worlds, beginning with a careful reading of some of his early “Celtic Twilight” poems and dramatic works, to see how he married folklore and nationalist theater. We will then turn to the middle and late poems, among them “Easter 1916,” “The Second Coming,” “Sailing to Byzantium,” “Among School Children,” and “Leda and the Swan.” In tandem, we will examine selections from A Vision, a study of various philosophical, historical, poetic, and astrological ideas, including a description of history as a series of interlocking gyres, each turning toward revelation and catastrophe. Like his contemporaries Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, Yeats was preoccupied by both symbolic systems and historical processes; it is in this light that we will read his poetry as political allegory, modernist experiment, and symbolic system—through which the poet aimed at shaping both individual consciousness and historical destiny. Throughout, we will ask: how might reading Yeats today speak to the tensions of our times and to our own fractured experience?
Course Schedule
Sunday, 2:00-5:00pm ETNovember 16 — December 14, 2025
4 sessions over 5 weeks
Class will not meet Sunday, November 30th.
$335.00
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