Lost In Recollection-A Histroricist Misreading Of Yeats' The Lake Isle Of Innis Free

William Butler Yeats ranks among the most widely admired and intensively studied writers of the twentieth century. He attracts such avid interest because, as T. S. Eliot famously suggested, his history is also the history of his time. Beginning as a late-Victorian aesthete and ending as an influential contemporary of Eliot and other modernists, Yeats set the pace for two generations of important writers. Along the way he responded with passion and eloquence to the political and cultural upheavals associated with Ireland's struggle for independence and with the decline of traditional beliefs about art, religion, empire, social class, gender and sex. But the same things that make Yeats captivating also make him difficult to study and to read: few fist-time readers know enough about his life and times to do justice to his poems, plays, and other writings. Consequently, the historicist reading, particularly a new historicist one, is left over to quite a blankness. To analyze, or even look into Yeats' through a historicist point of view, is a task too extensive and too pervasive to undergo, not to mention the branches and sub-branches of this methodology. In light of this, this thesis selects one little poem of Yeats' early stage to represent the great poet as a fledgling. For, not only this piece the lake isle of Innisfree is among the most beautiful writings of his and enjoys high reputation, but also it is a remarkably controversial one, which has since its first production seduced thousands of versions of reading, and of course, misreading. And as a matter of fact, this thesis largely aims to misread, for, as Harold Bloom has laid, to dig out influences on the part of the reader is to misread, and the influence itself proffers anxiety to original writers. In this thesis, however, Bloom's view is confronted by new historicism in that the very act of unmasking, critique and opposition uses the tool it condemns and risks falling prey to the practice it exposes. Here misreading is conducted though the philosophy of history and the anxiety is induced by H. D. Thoreau, the leading American transcendentalist who is best noted for his book Walden. Thoreau's images can be easily spotted from this little poem of Yeats', so it is no exaggeration to say that he is one of the "influences", although to refer to him in this thesis is to introduce the power and process of imagination and memory on the part of new historicism. According to the theory of new historicism, every expressive act is embedded in a network of material practices, and that literary and non-literary texts circulate inseparably. The question is whether imagination and memories, as a frequent part of expressive acts, serve as literary texts or non-literary texts. But whatever classification is, it is said that no discourse, imaginative or archival, gives access to unchanging truths, nor expresses inalterable human nature. What we are going to discuss here is not to make one's story sound plausible, nor dare we attempt to grasp the titanic mindset of Yeats and his complication of art, using an ever-too-late tool of literary criticism. The ultimate goal is perpetual: to read better. That's all. The analyzing only provides a different angle to read Yeats not only by understanding his beliefs, by seeing how his views were shaped by his life and times and how they in turn shaped his works, but also, more fundamentally and more excitingly, by opening oneself up imaginatively, by experiencing for oneself the powerful currents of thought and the desperately sweet memories.