The Swans at Coole Re-revisited:
W. B. Yeats and Figured Poetic Identity
I spent the better part of the 2002-03 academic year writing this undergraduate thesis on W. B. Yeats' The Wild Swans at Coole. In the grand scheme of Yeats' �uvre, the Wild Swans collection represents a turning point between "early Yeats" ("When You are Old," "The Wanderings of Ois�n," etc.) and what T. S. Eliot called "mature Yeats," especially Yeats' landmark collections Michael Robartes and the Dancer ("Easter, 1916" and "The Second Coming") and The Tower ("Sailing to Byzantium," "Leda and the Swan," and "Among School Children") which immediately followed The Wild Swans at Coole. In my study, I argue that Yeats sheds the unrequited love of Maud Gonne and the project of an autonomous Irish literature, the two themes that dominate his earlier work, to pursue a pure poetic practice and exposes this project through the circular logic of the collection. Central to my argument is the manner in which Yeats adopts various poetic masques, in doing so, creating a figured poet � a character if you will � behind the collection. What is at stake, I think, in my study is how we read a collection of poetry, in particular, the reading of narrative and the dramatic act of narration as a fictional authorship.
Download it here
On pages 48 and 49, I included two diagrams from Yeats' theoretical text A Vision that do not show up on the PDF file. I have reproduced them below.
fig. 1
fig. 2
Reproduced from W. B. Yeats, A Vision (New York: Collier, 1977), pp. 68 and 71, respectively.
| Author | | Leung, Godfre, 1981- |
| Title | | The Swans at Coole Re-revisited: W. B. Yeats and Figured Poetic Identity / Godfre Leung |
| Publication | | Portland : This Ain't No Press Club Press, c2003 |
| Description | | 60 p. : ill. |
| Notes | | Thesis (B.A.)--Reed College, 2003. |
| | Advisor, Lisa M. Steinman. |
| Add author | | Reed College (Portland, Or.) Division of Literature and Languages. English Dept. |