Affinities Between Yeats's Early Poems And Pre-Raphaelite Paintings

The famous Irish poet, William Bulter Yeats, is the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923. He was considered as the "the greatest Twentieth-century poet of the English language" by the American poet T. S. Eliot and holds an important position in English poetry, even in world literature. The Pre-Raphaelite style in Yeats's early poems is an important part in the constitution of Yeats's style evolvement. This thesis, on the basis of the studies on Yeats's early poems and Pre-Raphaelitism, is mainly engaged in the discussion of the affinities between Yeats's early poems and Pre-Raphaelite paintings.Yeats's early poems are not only similar in its style with Pre-Raphaelite paintings but also in its techniques. His early poems manifest some characteristics in the Pre-Raphaelite paintings: sentimental vein, idealism, escapism and defamiliarization. Besides, Yeats also adopted some Pre-Raphaelite painting elements in his poems. These adaptations helped Yeats to expand the possibilities of verbal expression.