W. B. Yeats and Tragedy

Abstract

This paper makes an attempt to trace the trajectory of how the aesthetics of Yeats’s poetic work, tragedy and tragic joy, has traveled in his long career. But, because it’s a complex and big question, it would not be possible to treat it here in full. Instead, I would point to a possibility of further studies on this subject. The best treatment that’s been published so far on this topic, though it covers the early 1900s, from 1902 to 10, is Frances Nesbitt Oppel’s Mask and Tragedy (1987) and Richard Ellmann’s Identity of Yeats (1954) that makes a brief yet early and clear judgment of Yeats’s tragedy, the latter book making a difference between Yeats and Friedrich Nietzsche. And Helen Vendler’s Yeats and Lyric Form (2007) and Majorie Perloff’s Rhyme and Meaning in the Poetry of Yeats (1970) are of great importance. But the last two books by Vendler and Perloff do not treat tragedy at all; I have chosen them to make an assumption of Yeats’s ideal form of work, or the architectonic structure of Yeats’s lyric poetry, connecting tragedy and poetic form. I call attention to two other scholars: Jahan Ramazani who reads Yeats’s elegies and Terence Brown who introduces Yeats’s “A General Introduction for My Work” and offers how tragic joy is to become Yeats’s new aesthetics.