W.B. Yeats Q: Consider W.B. Yeats as a romantic poet. Or What romantic elements do you find in Yeats’ poetry?

William Butler Yeats, the winner of Noble Prize for literature (1924) and one of the greatest modern poets, is regarded as a romantic poet by many critics. Not only that he claimed himself to be one of the last romantics. There are so many reasons for which W.B. Yeats is called a romantic poet. Infact, there were almost four phases of Yeats’ poetic career and a gradual development was conspicuous in his poetic life. He began writing poems in his first phase of life in the romantic and pre-Raphaelite tradition. There was an echo of Spenser, Shelley, Keats and a great influence of Blake, Coleridge and Wordsworth in his poetry. Let us trace the romantic element that we find in Yeats’ poems we have read.

                        Before going through Yeats’ poems, we should have a glimpse of the fundamental aspects of romanticism that marked the Romantic Movement in English literature. These aspects of romanticism are subjectivity, imagination, emotion, love for Nature, love for art and beauty, nostalgia, escapism, idealism, symbolism, mysticism, art for art’s sake etc. William Wordsworth and his followers established a strong foundation of this romantic tradition in English poetry. Almost all of these salient features of romanticism are available in W.B. Yeats’ earlier poems as well as in some of his later poems of matured age.

                        W.B. Yeats’ romantic notion is specially noticed in his love for Nature and countryside which we can trace in his early lyrics. Being dissatisfied and bored with the din and bustle of the mechanical modern society and urban civilization, Yeats’ romantic mind wanted to go back to the lap of Mother Nature and to the fairy land of fantasy which is free from sick hurry fret and fever. This tendency of returning to Nature and dreamland is obviously expressed in the earlier poems namely “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”, “Song of the Happy Shepherd”, “The Stolen Child”, “The Man Who Went to Fairyland”, “The Wanderings of Oisin” etc. the romantic elements of Yeats’ poem are vividly revealed in “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”:

             “I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

              And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:

              Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee

             And live alone in the bee-loud glade.”

W.B. Yeats’ “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” reminds us of Wordsworth’s famous romantic poem “Tintern Abbey”.