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Chapter 3 - “O When Will It Suffice?”

Poetry and Responsibility

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 April 2024

Gregory Castle
Affiliation:
Arizona State University
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Summary

Chapter 3, on Yeats’s middle period, begins with some reflections on his prose works that help explain his evolving ideas about art and personality, ideas that he formed in large part as the result of his friendship with John Synge. The logic of misrecognition, which in the early works animated his creation of both possible and impossible worlds, in mid-career works from Responsibilities (1914) to Michael Robartes and the “Dancer” (1921) tends to emphasize the the artist’s responsibility to the actual world from which he borrows to furnish his creations. The represented world of his work thus tends to dominate over the expressed world, but this does not prevent the latter from structuring reflections on history in a way that stresses the creative agency of the poet, driven by personality, the “shaping joy” of the artist. Personality enables a form of expressiveness in which the world of the work models new relations to (and alongside) historical time. It is central to Yeats’s worldmaking project and his relation to the actual world around him.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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  • “O When Will It Suffice?”
  • Gregory Castle, Arizona State University
  • Book: Yeats, Revival, and the Temporalities of Irish Modernism
  • Online publication: 11 April 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009411691.004
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  • “O When Will It Suffice?”
  • Gregory Castle, Arizona State University
  • Book: Yeats, Revival, and the Temporalities of Irish Modernism
  • Online publication: 11 April 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009411691.004
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.

  • “O When Will It Suffice?”
  • Gregory Castle, Arizona State University
  • Book: Yeats, Revival, and the Temporalities of Irish Modernism
  • Online publication: 11 April 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009411691.004
Available formats
×