Understanding the History: Antimonial Vision of Yeats VANSHIKA DHINGRA College

More so than any other Modernist writer, William Butler Yeats’ life and work reveal themselves to be intricately connected and draw on each other in multifarious ways. What makes Yeats’ poetry achieve so much power is the conscious employment of his antinomial vision which runs through his life and his work. Therefore any analysis of these strands in his work would have to operate with the assumption that for Yeats there was no clear distinction between life and work and the many antinomies which run through them.

Simply put, antinomial vision, implies a certain ability to hold opposing opinions together and we shall see in close analysis how central this vision is to his poetry. For Yeats, antinomy was the capacity to care for and withdraw simultaneously from something. Perhaps the very idea of opposing views for Yeatswould have come from his own experience itself. Yeats was famously involved in the Irish Cultural Revival and several aspects of the Irish struggle for autonomy thus firmly placing his personal, political and artistic concerns in the public arena. Generally sympathetic to the aristocratic values and art aesthetics, he also embraced the experience and wisdom of the common Irish peasantry, forming perhaps the first...