How Yeats Deploys Grammatical Resources to Establish Expressive Subjectivity

Abstract

In this paper, I make two basic arguments, using “Leda and the Swan” and “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death.” One argument is simply to display Yeats’s brilliance in deploying grammatical resources in order to anchor his poetry within a set of powers that are common to everyone yet manifestly deployed in the articulation of an individual’s powers to make fundamental life defining achievements of this. Second, I talk about the possible value of identity thinking in a literary world that is rapidly turning to seeing the self as fundamentally an agent defined as in continual flux and shaped by its conversations rather than by its capacity to articulate itself in terms of Hegel’s equation I = I, where the subject continually tries to articulate its own sense of historical substance.