|
'Now Shall I make My Soul': Appproaching Death in Yeats's Life and Work
This lecture took place on 06 December 2006
Professor Roy Foster, FBA, Hertford College, Oxford
W.B. Yeats sustained a lifelong interest in death, as a poetic subject and a philosophical problem - remarking that it was, along with sex, the only topic of abiding interest to a serious person. This lecture traces the preoccupation in its changing forms throughout his life, from his fin-de-siècle love-poetry through his poems on death as a political sacrifice to the anticipations of his own death in his middle and late poetry. This is linked to Yeats' interest in Celtic legend, magical ritual and psychic research, as well as to particularly Irish intellectual influences and conjunctions - including the appeal, of supernaturalism for Irish Protestants, a subject first addressed in my Chatterton lecture for the Academy nearly twenty years ago. The Warton lecture will also consider more general ideas of 'late style', and the death-cults of other modern poets. I will conclude by considering Yeats' creation of a structured canon of work in the light of his own death and the work which he wrote on his deathbed. This not only responded to questions he had been addressing himself and his readers all his life, but did so by returning to his early investigations of the otherworld. It will be argued that he contrived to arrive at a final resolution, both personal and aesthetic, for which he had prepared himself in unconventional but effective ways ever since his first apprenticeship to poetry, philosophy and passion.
|
