Retrospect without release: Yeats, Romanticism, history and criticism (William Butler Yeats, William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Plato, Aristotle)

My dissertation focuses on several core issues raised in readings of Plato, Aristotle, Wordsworth, Shelley and Yeats. Although it is essentially a reading of Yeats, in the sense that the other readings relate to theoretical questions raised explicitly in Yeats' prose and performed in his poetry, it is more generally a study of a series of issues that surround the theory and practice of the modern lyric. Put most succinctly, it concerns the relation of poetry to history, which, in the case of Yeats takes place in the movement from Romanticism to Modernism, and in the possibility of criticism: a term that, here, is not to be understood as literary criticism, but rather as the possibility of grasping the relationship of poetry and history anew. This relationship, which is often simply taken for granted (along with the philosophical terrain on which it was first inaugurated), is much more fragile than most literary-critical references to it would leave one to believe. The following readings thus converge at those critical moments when this fragility is exposed. In this sense, Yeats' poetry is itself critical, and the final analyses of his poetry (which are prefaced by analyses of both of Yeats' reading of Shelley, and then of de Man's early study of Yeats) focus on different aspects of his poetry and his plays in terms of a series of critical acts.