The anti-imperial heroic in Wordsworth and Yeats (William Wordsworth, William Butler Yeats, Ireland)

This thesis shows how Wordsworth renovates the tradition of anti-imperial heroism, creating forms of it which are relevant to the modern world, and how Yeats develops such forms further, testing them within immediate and extreme experiences of personal and political conflict. Wordsworth heroicizes sympathetically several sorts of positions and people defined as "other" within the framework of the British Empire: the Celtic, especially the Scottish; women and the feminine; the natural as opposed to the technological; Africans and Caribbeans. Yeats's work and life extend elements of the anti-imperial heroism envisioned by Wordsworth, despite the fact that Yeats's own position is one more exposedly privileged and empowered by the British Empire.; For both poets, there is a tension between anti-imperial sentiments and affiliation with their largely English and upper-class cultural tradition. Both support and dramatize various forms of liberation from the empire which, at the same time, empowers men of their class and background, and privileges their culture, more than it does other people and cultural traditions within the empire. Revolution in Ireland forces to the surface the duality and divided loyalties of the anti-imperial heroic within English poetry, an ambivalence present in Wordsworth, but less aggravated than in Yeats, given Wordsworth's position nearer the secure heart of the British Empire.