LIT144 CM - W.B. Yeats

The Irish poet William Butler Yeats, one of the “last romantics,” as he called himself, was considered by T. S. Eliot to be “the greatest poet of our time — certainly the greatest in this language, and as far as I am able to judge, in any language.” Love, art, history, politics, and the supernatural are his central themes. Yeats is a central figure of High Modernism, but among modernists his poetry remains distinctively personal. In this course we will trace Yeats’ fifty-year career, from the early days of the Celtic Twilight in the 1890s to the great poems of old age written on the brink of World War II and including Yeats’s contribution to the Irish national theater.

Offered: Every other year

Credit: 1

Course Number: LIT 144 CM