The Antithetical View in W. B. Yeats’s Poems: Focused on A Vision and Related Poems

Abstract

Yeats was a poet who was somewhat ambiguous, and his poems in The Tower are full of a bitterness which seems irrational in the face of all his successes. One of the consistent characteristics of Yeats’s poetry is his pursuit after the eternal through the juxtaposition of antithetical elements such as face and mask, self and soul, and natural and the supernatural. Yeats’s changes of style and his maturity were probably not recognised until the publication of The Tower in 1928. There was also the sharpened anxiety, stemming from Ireland’s civil war, of approaching conflagration in the world and, of ruin and decay. Yeats had become ‘a smiling sixty-year-old public man’, but with ironic memories of lost youth and love. Also, he had the tower to remind him that the glory of a family or a house can vanish. His poems took on new framework; they dealt freely with many of his moods and interests: philosophy, politics, history, friendship, and love. He wrote of them as they affected his own imaginative life, and his imagination grew stronger as his body decayed. He looked back on the poetry of The Tower at bitterness and power, but it also involved an antithetical view.