Yeats the Modernist Writer “You know what the Englishman's idea of compromise is? He says, Some people say there is a God. Some people say there is no God. The truth probably lies somewhere between these two statements,” (William Yeats). Pushing past the traditional beliefs of society and emerging into new styles of abstract thinking of the psyche was the creation of modernism and with this the human soul was embodiment of William Yeats’s writing characterizing him as a influential modernist writer. Throughout his years of life, Yeat’s had an abundance of life experience, he had witnessed the Irish independence movement and the coming and ending of World War I, while later uptaking the political position of senator in the new Irish Free State. William Yeats was often referred to as genius in writing granting him the Nobel Prize in Literature "for his always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation," (nobelprize.org). Through Yeats's poetry, people can find new realizations of life, love, and the soul. Yeats’s is able to incorporate his own life as a focal point of his poetry through his own rejection of love and his melancholy perspective of the natural cycle of aging. Yeat’s pieces When You Are Old, Among School Children, and Sailing to Byzantium are …show more content…
“Nor beauty born out of its own despair” (Yeats), one cannot be without the other. “Are you the leaf, the blossom, or the bole” (Yeats), Yeats asks the readers whether the life was one of these three entities, However, he argues life is all three and it’s truly the “O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,” (Yeats). Yeats states that you cannot separate “the dancer from the dance” (Yeats) meaning life isn’t separate from death. These two concepts are not independent from each other, rather they are the same. You are not alive, unless you are able