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Chapter 2 - “A Dream-Heavy Land”

Other Worlds in Yeats’s Early Poetry and Drama

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 April 2024

Gregory Castle
Affiliation:
Arizona State University
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Summary

Chapter 2 focuses on the early poetry and drama, in which Yeats discovers the worldmaking potential of art and creates at least two kinds of autonomous imaginary worlds: an impossible one based on the otherworld of faery, a parallel world of nonhuman beings and magical practices, and a possible one based on the private world of the lover and beloved, a world created in the artistic recasting of memory and desire. In the poetry, temporality is recursive and generative, with aspects of the past and future arranged in a nested fashion so that temporal moments are embedded in one another and, in a sense, produce one another. The early drama tends to express this tensed temporality in terms of the confrontation between two worlds: the actual world and the faery otherworld. These tensed temporalities enable both an accommodation of what is outside the realm of human experience and a renewed sense of the nature and limits of that experience. Misprision – the strange deceptions of the faery otherworld on the one hand and the recollected fantasies that structure so many of the early poems on the other – characterizes these new temporal arrangements.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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  • “A Dream-Heavy Land”
  • Gregory Castle, Arizona State University
  • Book: Yeats, Revival, and the Temporalities of Irish Modernism
  • Online publication: 11 April 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009411691.003
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  • “A Dream-Heavy Land”
  • Gregory Castle, Arizona State University
  • Book: Yeats, Revival, and the Temporalities of Irish Modernism
  • Online publication: 11 April 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009411691.003
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • “A Dream-Heavy Land”
  • Gregory Castle, Arizona State University
  • Book: Yeats, Revival, and the Temporalities of Irish Modernism
  • Online publication: 11 April 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009411691.003
Available formats
×