Department of English

Though he is widely regarded as Ireland’s most famous nationalist poet, W.B. Yeats’ role in the Celtic Revival and Irish nationalist movement is regularly debated. My thesis examines how Yeats’s early poems used the love poem tradition to outline a specific set of social and political beliefs, in the process turning a future Ireland into an unattainable muse. I argue that Yeats was an official nationalist who relied on the struggle for Irish independence to produce poetry in the love poem tradition, and once independence had been achieved, he struggled to find his place in Irish society while becoming increasingly frustrated with the state of Ireland. By reading his early works like Cathleen Ni Houlihan, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”, and “A Poet to His Beloved” as love poems and stories directed to Yeats’ idealized Ireland against the bitter ragings of Purgatory, “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” “Sailing to Byzantium,” and “Under Ben Bulben,” I chart Yeats’ path towards embodying the “old man on the boiler,” a figure that he describes in his final publications. While I argue that Yeats remains an iconic literary figure in terms of form and linguistic beauty, I point towards the dissonance between Yeats’ idealized Ireland and the independent Irish state from 1921 to his death in 1939.