W. B. Yeats: The Masked Poet

English > Analysis
Literature > European (other)
Literature > Poetry

Explains how self-imagery in the poetry of W. B. Yeats relies on his "Doctrine of the Mask", a projection of his anti-self that changed the style of his poetry permanently.

1,864 words () | 7 sources | MLA | 2005 United States

Paper Summary:

W. B. Yeats believed that poetry should be "personal utterance" but from from the accidence of daily life. This paper discusses how after his first two collections, he adopted the device of the mask to project a harder anti-self to control his passionate speech. It shows how the mask changed his style and altered his themes significantly.

From the Paper:

"The spinning coin of Yeats's poetics bears his personal profile on one side and his self-projection on the other. His poetry of "personal utterance" thus avoids personalized subjectivity by exploiting the notion of the self and anti-self, as he categorizes those supposedly antithetical profiles in his theory of the mask. Yeats adapts persona and mask to prevent the "accidence" of his personal life from distracting from his calculated "personal utterance" in print, and thereby creates associated fables of his mythology of self, embodied by the heroicized or visionary company that populates his poems."

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APA Citation:

W. B. Yeats: The Masked Poet (2012, January 15). Retrieved February 10, 2012, from http://www.academon.com/Analytical-Essay-W-B-Yeats-The-Masked-Poet/60504