W.B. Yeats as a Romantic poet

            Introduction

William Butler Yeats, the winner of Nobel Prize for literature 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. In fact, there were almost four phases of its poetic career and gradual development was conspicius 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 Spencer, Shaelly , Keats and a great influence of Blake, Coleridge and Wordsworth in his poetry.

           Aspects of Romanticism

Before going through Yeats poems, we should have a glimpse of the fundamental aspects of romanticism.These aspects 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.

            Love for nature

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 board 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 fairyland 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 a Isle of Innisfree", "Songs of the Shepherd", "The Stolen Child", "The Man Who Went to Fairyland", "The Wanderings of Oisin", etc.

                 Symbolism

A very important ingredient of Yeats romanticism is his use of symbols. He has sometimes been hailed as the English speaking representative of the French symbolist School. The Irish mythology is almost as rich in great stories and figures as the mythology. It was upon this story that he drew for symbols. The symbols of its early poetry are occurred in character. He makes use of the occult symbols of rose, cross, lily, bird, water, tree, moon and sun. In the light of the poems "Sailing to Byzantium" and "The Second Coming" symbolism is the elemental vehicle Yeats employs to enhance those poems. In "The Second Coming" the poet starts the poem with the image of a Falcon flying out of earshot from its human master. However the Falcon has gotten itself lost by flying too far away. The symbol of Falcon symbolises the collapse of traditional social arrangements in Europe at the time Yeats was writing. In the poem "Leda and the Swan", the swan is a symbol of Zeus but that the bird is even a swan. It gets even more complicated; swans are a favourite animal for Yeats to work into his verse as a symbol of inscrutable passion and desire. Poem " A Dialogue between the Self and  Soul" is the attitude towards the human body and experience which reverses the the traditional Christian stance. This poem is filled with painful memories and images from Yeats life. Symbolism made it possible for Yeats to express "the richness of man's deeper reality" which is something essentially mystical.

                Imagination

Yeats verse has some lovely qualities and procedures which make him not the same as the others. His distraction with the endeavour to plan a philosophical framework which could supplant the logical realism of his age underlines the majority of his later verse. Yeats trust was in the creative energy and instict of man as opposed to in logical thinking, and his endeavour was to reach back, through the investigation of Irish old stories and legend, to the primitive driving forces of human life."Leda and the Swan" is essentially a depiction of violent sexual encounter between a woman and a bird. If we find ourselves sympathetic to the ancient Greek perspective, we might think that the encounter is a divine and mystical experience. In the poem "The Second Coming" the poet images of sphinx in the desert, and we are meant to think that this mystical animal, rather than Christ, is what is coming to fulfill the prophecy from the Biblical Book of Revelation .

              Mysticism

Yeats may be credited primarily with the honour of contributing the elements of mysticism to modern poetry. He juxtaposes historical figures with Irish legends and myths and hence create something new and different, it is to be considered that Yeats is one of the writer that utilise the elements of the supernatural stemming from Irish mythology, and one of the fewer who also integrated romantic notions into his poetry. Yeats is the only  modern poet who initiated occult system and mysticism in his poetry. Mysticism runs throughout his poetry in which the Gods and the fairies of the Celtic mythology live again. To Yeats, a poet is very close to a mystic and poet's mystical experiences give to the poem spiritual world.

              Love for Beauty

The oddness of magnificence draws in the consideration of the pursuer and leads them to see the components of the sentimental soul. There are two constituent in sentimental soul. One of them is "interest" which constitutes the "educated person" component of the Romanticism and the other is "the affection for magnificence" which sets up the enthusiastic. Synods notices  "the beauty personas" which is "established not just in physiognomy and logic semantics, ethnic relations, war and criminology, additionally in our artistic legacy". To Yeats the fundamental components of the sentimental soul are interest and the admiration for beauty.

               Conclusion

Imagination, romanticism, beauty and nature in light of an occult set of  symbols, and which he laid out in his life usually considered important romantic experiences today only for light. It sheds on some of his  poems. In addition to that, in his most prominent lyrics, He mitigates this self importance with an attention all alone profound feeling. Throughout his life, Yeats has used his poetry as a means for solving his problems. A coming- of- age person involves a person learning about himself, and therefore, during the middle Yeats period, he usually comes -of -age after writing a poem. The sonnets for which he is well known, be that as it may - even those which exhibit troubles of comprehension- are perfect works of art, catalytic changes of the crude material of his speciality.