Visual Arts In W.B. Yeats’s Lyrical Poetry

The Irish poet William Butler Yeats acknowledges his accepting of visual arts and its affinity with his poetry, which validates the research of Yeats’s poetry and visual arts. He abandons the morbid themes and styles of his English peers and develops his poetic styles amid the artistic atmosphere of his family. His teenage painting apprenticeship also enables him to take inspirations from the works of the visual arts and his poetry demonstrates conspicuous themes, techniques and stylistic features of the visual arts. The present research follows this belief and explores the influence of Yeats’s preferences for different painting styles upon the stages of his poetic writing, including Pre-Raphaelism, Greek sculpture, Byzantine art, Japanese Noh drama and Chinese landscape painting, indicating his identifications with different cultures. The dissertation, on the basis of the studies on Yeats’s lyrical poetry, is mainly engaged in the discussion of the affinities between Yeats’s lyrical poetry and the elements of visual arts, exploring its relations to the themes, styles and manners of visual arts.There are elements in Yeats’s poetry that come from the European continental painting heritage. Meanwhile, abundant evidences demonstrate his fascination with oriental arts. He adopts images and ways of representation from visual arts and employs them into his poetry, and thus endeavors to innovate his versification. The manners within the art works and their aesthetic ideas he has borrowed from visual arts effectively help him to expand the possibilities of verbal expression. The visual elements enrich his poetic forms and reveal his unique contributions as a poet when English poetry was transiting from Romanticism to Modernism. He associates the inspirations he recognized from the art works with his life experiences, Irish nationality and the western spiritual crisis in modern society. The dissertation discusses the conspicuous images in Yeats’s poems, identifies what he considered to be elements of Irishness and probes further into his understanding of culture and human history.The dissertation aims to show how Yeats associates the images and concepts of visual arts with his life experiences. It tries to identify how Yeats organizes various visual experiences in a single poem, exhibiting the important roles different visual patterns that have played in his poetry and tracing the development of his artistic understandings. Besides the introduction and conclusion, the main body consists of five chapters. The first chapter tracks down Yeats’s involvements with different trends of visual arts, in the process of which his family influence, his education and the1890s artists serve as consistent contributors. Yeats’s views on visual arts and poetry will be highlighted here. Chapter Two focuses on Yeats’s early indulgence in Pre-Raphaelitism, developing parallels between Pre-Raphaelite paintings and his imagery and sense of pattern. Many of Yeats’s techniques reveal the mannerism of romantic painters, especially in the contrast of colours, clear delineation, detailed and repetitive description of the characters and his manipulation of light and shade for certain dramatic effects. He depicts the Rossettian women images in his poetry, who show up as background of Irish folktales and legends in order to awaken the collective unconsciousness of the Irish people and display the poet’s pursuit for and recognition of the national identity. Chapter Three explores Yeats’s fascination with Greek sculpture and Byzantine arts, focusing on the sculptural qualities of his lyrical poetry and his treatment of conflicts and historical cycling in poems such as "Leda and the Swan." This chapter traces the origin of Yeats’s notion of the cyclical movement of history arising from the mutual interactions between the active and passive. As a poet prophet, Yeats presents history with the lunar phases and the wheel, and applies the symbol of Byzantium and its geometrical icons to show his idea of "Unity of Being." The mosaic paintings and the golden bird stand respectively important in his artistic designs. Chapter Four takes up Yeats’s borrowing images from Japanese visual arts as these images are developed from Responsibilities (1914) to The Tower (1928). This chapter attempts to demonstrate the symbolic meanings of the dancer image in the Noh drama and Sato’s sword. The Zen thoughts implied in poems like "Among the School Children" are representative of Yeats’s artist representation of the oriental civilization. Dance becomes a medium for him, helping to mediate and arrive at the spiritual experience in harmony with the universe. Based on the related theories of Ekphrasis and the scattering evidences in Yeats’s poems, essays, autobiographies and letters, Chapter Five intends to articulate how Yeats assimilates the essence of traditional Chinese aesthetics in Chinese classical poetry and landscape paintings, particularly Taoism, into his poetry writing. He constructs "Lapis Lazuli" with typical images in Chinese landscape painting and provides a holy land for the West, where the poet may transcend the restrictions imposed by death. The place corresponds to the holy land he has established in his early poetry and enables the poetical soul to cycle in the realm of eternity and the infinite.The elements of the visual arts enrich the contents and forms of Yeats’s lyrical poems, and help to construct his status as a Romanticist and Modernist poet. Yeats has undergone experiments to incorporate the visual arts into poetry and fashion the themes and techniques in his poetry. The unique employment of the various visual elements demonstrates his exploration of poetic art, which sets an example for the modern English poets and shows his strong sense of social responsibility as a poet to search for the outlet for the western society.