Yeats and Oedipus

Abstract

This chapter discusses how reception of Sophocles enabled W. B. Yeats to address domestic political tensions and negotiate his position in Irish nationalism in the context of British and subsequent Catholic censorship, and later to locate Ireland in the years between the two world wars within his vision of a universal cycle. A production of Oedipus the King at the University of Notre Dame, a Catholic institution in the US, inspired Yeats to produce his own version of the play, for which he closely consulted the edition of distinguished classicist Richard Claverhouse Jebb, who was of Irish descent. Yeats continued to be inspired by Sophocles and by Greek philosophy as he worked on A Vision. His thoughts on cyclical transformations reflect a classically informed system of gyres which he saw instantiated in the end of the classical era, the death of Christ, and the violent upheavals of his own times.