The Political Yeats in “Easter 1916” and Other Poems and Cathleen Ni Houlihan

Abstract

This paper aims to redefine the nature of some so-called political pieces, by reading a few poems and a play by Yeats. Some critics classify them as “political pieces” when Yeats may have intended them to be otherwise. The paper claims that they are neither political nor non-political: they form part of a bigger system, part of the whole structure of his work. If we read the pieces this way, we could better understand the complex work of Yeats and the complex Yeats who has baffled so many critics and literary historians. It will raise basic questions as to the validity of such claims and make attempts to answer them more clearly than not by putting those pieces in the context of his whole work and its system.