Is Yeats a Major Poet? Rethinking Yeats’s Mythology

Abstract

This essay aims at rethinking W. B. Yeats as a major poet of the 20th century; and will further evaluate his major poems to determine if he could be called the greatest poet of the last and current century. The reading of the “major” poems is not to be exhaustive—and needs not to be so—because it seems to me that as the evaluation of Yeats as a major poet in the last century seems to have already been made by major critics and poets, in the mid-20th century, during the two or three decades after his death in 1939. including T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden, themselves major or great poets of the last century. My perspective is focused on the suspicion of Yeats as a great poet as held by T. S. Eliot and Auden; they seem to be dubious while I am affirmative as far as mythology is concerned; their doubt is based on the very fact that Yeats is a poet of “magic” (Hall 1). That Yeats has been a poet of magic does not present any problem, but rather offers a great solution to the obstacle of sterile 20th century poetics. Eliot’s use of mythology, for instance, differs from Yeats’s. He treats mythology qua mythology as exemplified in “The Waste Land.” This essay is an attempt to focus on how Yeats’s major poems make use of mythology, which makes him different from the rest of major poets of the last century.