The Poet's Craft

Romanticism and Irish History

We can distinguish quite clearly the main periods into which Yeats's poetic career falls. He began in the tradition of self-conscious Romanticism, which he learned from the London poets of the 1890s. Edmund Spenser and Percy Bysshe Shelley, and a little later William Blake, were also important influences. One of his early verse plays ends with a song:

The woods of Arcady are dead
And over is their antique joy;
Of old the world on dreaming fed;
Grey Truth is now her painted toy.

About the same time he was writing poems (e.g., "The Stolen Child") deriving from his Sligo experience, with a quiet precision of natural imagery, country place names, and themes from folklore. A little later he was influenced by Standish O'Grady's History of Ireland: Heroic Period, where he found the great stories of the heroic age of Irish history, and George Sigerson's and Douglas Hyde's translations of Gaelic poetry. The heroic legends of old Ireland and the folk traditions of the modern Irish countryside provided Yeats with a stiffening for his early dreamlike imagery, which is why even his first, "nineties" phase produced interesting poems.

In 1903, Yeats wrote a letter to an acquaintance named Ella Young about stories she had sent him which touched on his own interests in Irish folklore and mythology.

Click below to see page 1 of the letter.

Click below to see page 2 of the letter.