Among School Children Poem

He did this still within the structure of Romantic poetry. One structure of romantic poetry that Yeats utilizes is ottava rima, which is a rhyming stanza form that originates from Renaissance Italy. The form is primarily used with heroic verses; however, as suggested in “Among School Children,” it can also be utilized for satirical mock-heroic verse. In “Among School Children,” Yeats experiments with ottava rima using half and full rhymes in eight stanzas and iambic pentameter. Through his experimentation, he begins the poem as a “smiling public man, ” an Irish Senator and Nobel laureate, and becomes a student like those he’s watching by the fourth stanza (213). This unfamiliar experimentation as Vendler claims is Modernist, “the unfamiliarity of such traditional patterns of rhyme, and the oddity of lines – such as those in the quatrains – in which lines that rhyme do not exhibit the same-length – make this a formalist house, yes, but a distinctly Modernist one” (Vendler 85-6). The unconventional patterns of the poem, indeed, contrast with his earlier works; yet, his late works share similarities with the latter. His late poetic works like “Among School Children” still are in a Romantic-era poetic form like sonnet

Nonetheless, Vendler contends that this poetic work does not speak for the majority of Yeats’ latest phase. In her chapter “The later poetry,” she asserts that “though [the poems] use conventional genres…each genre is refreshed in Yeats’s hands, so that while recognizing the convention, we also recognize the Yeatsian originality of handling” (100). This claim is fallacious; Vendler distinguishes Yeats as his own institution to subject him to Modernism and object him from Romanticism. However, if one argues that Yeats is not a Romanticist, because he is his own institution one must assume the same for Modernism. Moreover, Vendler’s argument conflates the person and argument, which befuddles the already complex nature of poetry. Yet complex by nature, “Among School Nature” is set in a comprehensive mode. In the poem, Yeats details his visit through the aforementioned stream of conscious process. This approach although Modernist at heart suggests the Romantic genre of legacy. Yeats is preoccupied with understanding his legacy throughout the poem. He at a glance is a Nobel laureate and Senator whilst also an impressionable student wanting to learn more through discovery. This inquisitive nature of Yeats’ is furthered in his questioning of his mother, “Would think her son, did she but see that shape/ With sixty or more winters on its head” (Yeats 214).