Romantic Elements and W B Yeats

Romantic elements, basically found in the poems of the Romantic poets in the Ninetieth Century, are not the sole property of the poets of that time rather a unique inspiration for innumerable poets of the world beyond this time frame in England and other countries. The poets in Romantic Period (1798-1832) and before and after this period usually treated the following elements as ingredients of romanticism. These elements are-love of Nature, high imagination, emotion, individualism, supernaturalism, mysticism, escapism, beauty, interest in remoteness, weakness to Greek mythology, objectivity, primitivism or spontaneity, simplicity in expression, revolutionary zeal, reformation, spirituality, melancholy, medievalism and the past, , childhood-innocence and adulthood, the common man, freedom and revolution, transience, exoticism, and the poet as prophet. The romantic poets- William Wordsworth, S T Coleridge, William Blake, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron and John Keats, mostly used the above mentioned elements in their poems. But before them, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare and other poets applied them in their poems as basic elements. They were not out of Romanticism. Actually, Romanticism is a doctrine that is free from the rigid literary rules of the Classical and Neoclassical period. The influence of romanticism dwindled in Victorian period and after this period, we get Modern period. The poets of the Modern period are by nature anti romantic –but W B Yeats (1865-1939), the national poet of Ireland and one of the influential poets of Modern period was strongly moved by the romantic influence and wrote many of his poems following romantic trend. That’s why W B Yeats is called the last romantic poet in English Literature. The subject matter of this study is “Romantic elements and W B Yeats”. For this study, I have selected nine poems by W. B. Yeats—namely, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” “No Second Troy,” “Sailing to Byzantium,” “A Prayer for My Daughter,” “The Second Coming,” “The White Birds,” “When You Are Old,” “Leda and the Swan,” and “The Wild Swans at Coole”—to explore the romantic elements present in them and examine their use and significance.

romantic elements, inspiration, escapism, mysticism, reformation, mythology, W B Yeats

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