Research On William Butler Yeats’s Love Poems

William Butler Yeats is a poet representative of late symbolism poetry, also considered as one of the most important writers of 20 th century literature in English. He made a great contribution to the Movement of Irish independence and Ireland of the Renaissance in 20 th century. For“ his always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation”, he won the Nobel Prize in literature 1923. Yeats is one of Ireland’s greatest poets and a well known figure in the world of literature. As a world-class poet he had written a large number of love poems; some commentators even said that Yeats wrote the most beautiful love poems in modern English poetry. Through the method of close reading, this thesis uses the Biographical research and the theory of Archetype to analyze the language and imageries in Yeats’ s love poems, in order to reveal his modernized perspective on love.This thesis is divided into five chapters to demonstrate this point. The first chapter is the introduction, which discusses the previous research done on Yeats’ s love poetry, the methods and meanings of this thesis. Chapter Ⅱ summarizes the main contents of Yeats’ s love poems. Chapter Ⅲ,will discuss his modernized view of love through the language of poetry and the third person narrative. Chapter four will make a similar analysis through the imageries found in his poems in reference to mythology. Chapter Ⅴ summarizes the thesis briefly and comes to conclusion that Yeats’ s perspective of love is filled with contradictions between the spirit and the flesh, demonstrating its modernity.