Yeats, William Butler - Joyce Carol Oates (essay date 1969)
Joyce Carol Oates (essay date 1969)
SOURCE: "Yeats: Violence, Tragedy, Mutability," in Bucknell Review, Vol. XVII, No. 3, December 1969, pp. 1-17.
[In the following excerpt, Oates asserts that the violent events and "farfetched and grotesque" images of Yeats's work are a result of his view of life as a dynamic chaos that needs to be shaped and controlled through art.]
In his last poems Yeats moves toward a contemplative and dispassionate assertion of the joy that can arise out of tragedy, and the poem that ends his career, "Under Ben Bulben," leaves us with the image of a cold eye looking upon life and death equally, unmoved, like the golden bird of "Sailing to Byzantium" that sings equally of what is past, or passing, or to come. Yet the jagged tonalities of the last poems will not be reconciled by the theoretical claim for a dispassionate unity, just as certain poems, examined individually, will not support their apparent themes. Yeats'...
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