Khalifa, R: W.B. Yeats: A Poetics of Ideology

W. B. Yeats: A Poetics of Ideology investigates the articulations of ideology in Yeats from the beginning of his poetic career. The book seeks to contextualize this ideology within what I call the modernist predicament. Yeats s articulation of politics can be divided into three major phases. The first focuses on his juvenilia, where politics is articulated in the pastoral trope at the unconscious level of the text. The second is explicitly expressed in Yeats s imaginative nationalism. Here Ireland is painted as a utopian land, an extension of his early pastoral world. In such an idyllic depiction of the nation traumatic events like the Great Hunger are glossed over. The third phase grounds Yeats in the modernist predicament. Here the poet s consciousness of the discrepancy between aesthetics and praxis, poetry and modernity, is paramount to our understanding of the Yeatsian crisis. The crisis articulates itself in Yeats s politicization of space and claustrophilia. The book aims to trace the development or, better still, radicalization of Yeats s political thought, especially with regard to modernity and the Enlightenment.