| William Butler Yeats (W. B. Yeats1865-1939), the winner of the Noble Prize for literature in1923, was honored by Thomas Sterns Eliot as"the greatest poet of our time--certainly the greatest in his language, and as far as I can judge, in any language". He is constantly being called as the "Irish Soul". A mainstay of both the Irish and British literary establishment, Yeats is also the driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival. For Critics of modern poetry considered that Yeats’s poetry is always abundant with passions and Ireland’s troubled history, with modern time’s loss of faith in traditional beliefs about art, also about the personal disappointments, but few people paid attention to the meanings of the body from the historical and cultural aspects, especially from the angle of the body itself. The author of this thesis will focus on the historical, cultural and aesthetical points of Yeats’ writing of the body and engage them closely with his poems from a range of pertinent theoretical standpoint. The thesis will provide a detailed discussion of the poems and employs theoretical approaches which give special attention to the developing of the human body. These discussions conducted from the aspects, which include are the Irishness and Yeats’ Achillean body, the construction of Yeats’cultural identity and reviving body and also the thinking through the body. By using some body narrative theories, the present thesis wants to explore the attitude of Yeats towards the changes of the body, at the same time, the changes in his attitude toward the whole nation.The whole thesis is composed of five parts as follows:The introductory part, after doing literature review of the body research in W. B. Yeats’poems, brings out the universal ideas about W. B. Yeats’attitude towards the human body. While stating the theories employed and the significance of using body narrative for analyzing these poems, it introduces the main idea of the present thesis.Chapter one focuses on the Irishness and Yeats’Achillean body, which is demonstrated by the involvement of the war of independence and the recovered body, the decline of the colony and Yeats’searching for unity and also body as the propaganda of Yeats’nationalism. It mainly analyzes Yeats’s retrospect of Ireland’s colonial background and the connection between the turbulent nation and the human body in his works.Chapter two predominantly concentrates on the construction of the cultural identity and the reviving body. Based on the correlated background of Irish identity crisis, this chapter can be subdivided into three parts:marginalized cultural identity and Yeats’ ideal of the unity of body and soul, Ireland’s fairy tradition and Yeats’s reborn body, the lost rose and the poet’s body. This chapter analyzes the construction of cultural and national identity and also his search for the unity of body and soul.Chapter three is engaged in bodily energy and heroic action. The Aesthetic perspective here is considered as a discourse of the human body. The whole chapter describes the Yeats’s reassertion of the body, in which he considered that the human being need to embrace and comprehend truth through our concrete, sensory experiences, and he also emphasized the importance of Nietzsche’s masculine body which is totally different with the marginalized body.The conclusion brings out W. B. Yeats’ attitude toward the human body, which can be generally summarized as, the unity of the body and soul, and the process from the recovered body to marginalize body and the masculine or aesthetic body. |
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