Community and individualism in the poetry of W. B. Yeats and Seamus Heaney.

Abstract

This dissertation examines the tension between individual vision and communal affiliation informing the poetry of W. B. Yeats and Seamus Heaney. Chapter I examines Yeats's life and work in the years 1886-1900, when he propag and ized against the rhetorical traditions inherited from the nationalist verse of the Young Irel and Movement of the 1840s. The early poetry exemplifies the non-partisan patriotic vision which Yeats admired in Samuel Ferguson's poems, and it tends to contrast nationalist passion with a transcendent vision. Chapter II discusses the increased vigor of Yeats's valorization of individual vision in the face of nationalist pressure to tailor Abbey Theatre productions to propag and ist needs. As Yeats after 1900 became increasingly disillusioned with the nationalist movement, which he thought had become controlled by "mob passion," he turned to an idealized Ascendancy tradition as a contrast to contemporary Irel and . In Responsibilites (1914) Yeats places himself within a family tradition of passion and public service, although the collection recommends individual vision which is seen as often antithetical to communal affiliation. Chapter II examines Yeats's poetry from 1914 to 1928, showing the Yeatsian speaker's need for both isolated meditation and communal affiliation: in the poetry of Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921) and The Tower (1928) Yeats recognizes the appeal but also the limitations of poetic isolation. Yeats served as an example for post-war poets of the possibility of addressing the question of nationalism and the violent world of Irish politics without becoming consumed by partisan rhetoric and popular cliche. The last two chapters show how Seamus Heaney appropriates Yeats's tropes and phrases, especially in his prose, and how his poetry reproduces the tension Yeats's work expressed between individualism and community.