A Study Of Yeats’s Poetry From The Perspective Of Archetypal Criticism

William Butler Yeats is an outstanding Irish poet and one of the foremost figures of20th century literature. He made numerous contributions to the improvement of poetry.As a poet, he is mainly reputed for his energy, erudiction, beauty and skill. His poetrydrew heavily on myths and allusions to arouse the people’s understanding of and passionfor freedom and liberty by Irish people. In1923, Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize forLiterature. As a passionate patriot as well as an outstanding poet, Yeats won himselftremendous love and respects from the poor and the rich, the old and the young all overthe world.This thesis attempts to approach W. B. Yeats with the archetypal criticism and thetextual analysis of his poetry. The thesis starts with the discussion of the relationshipbetween poetry and myth. Then it studies the factors that influence his mythical creation,such as mysticism, religion, philosophy, Greek myths and Irish mythological allusions.After that the thesis explores the main archetypes, such as the original sin, theresurrection and the quest in Yeats’s poetry, which showed author’s longing for love, hispursuit of eternity, and his unbearable pity for the sufferings of mankind.It is believed that Yeats used a lot of myths and archetypes in his poetry in order toenhance the symbolic meaning and mysteriousness of his poetry, to reach the depth ofmodern men’s psyche, to reflect man’s “collective consciousness” and to bring about acosmic order into the modern society by constructing a continuous parallel structurebetween contemporaneity and antiquity.