Leda and the Swan | The Subject of Leda and the Swan
In
the following essay, the author discusses Yeats’s choice of
a brutal rape as the subject of his poem “Leda and
the Swan.”
When “Leda and the Swan” was first published in 1924 (in a version somewhat different than the final form that appears in modern collections of Yeats’s verse), it aroused criticism from the Catholic press in Ireland because of its sexually explicit subject matter—the violent rape of a mortal woman by a god who had taken on the form of a swan. Yeats published the poem in a radical journal and hoped to stir up controversy in order to make the point that he opposed the country’s repressive attitude toward “immoral” literature.
In the early twenty-first century,...
[The entire page is 1857 words long]
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