The Place of Writing and the Imaginative Journey in W. B. Yeats’s The Tower
Date Issued
2012
Date
2012
Author(s)
Liau, Yun-Jen
Abstract
This thesis investigates the relationship between The Tower and Yeats’s Galway tower, Thoor Ballylee, as his symbol of art and place of writing. I argue that The Tower represents an imaginative journey and reflects Yeats’s sustained meditation on the founding moments of his native country. The first chapter offers a background survey of the historical context in which most of the Tower poems were written, and examines the two main factors that had motivated Yeats’s return to the political and cultural center of Ireland in the 1920s. The second chapter beings with an investigation of the literary and occult associations of the tower symbol most relevant to Yeats’s understanding, and seeks to tease out the topographic significance of Thoor Ballylee in completing the tower symbol and becoming Yeats’s place of writing. The third chapter analyzes how The Tower can be read as an imaginative journey of the poet’s repeated disengagement and reengagement with contemporaneous Irish history, which begins from the problem of old age and questioning of the artist’s role, through a “dreaming back” of Ireland’s volatile and violent recent past in the early 1920s, discovers an ideal image for the unity of being for both community and individual, and finally concludes in the contentment and equanimity of the mind’s “wandering.” In the process, the place of writing has also become the written place in the work. By doing so, this thesis hopes to provide new vantage points from which to reexamine and appreciate one of Yeats’s finest poetry collections.
Subjects
The Tower
Thoor Ballylee
the place of writing
poetic symbol
lyric form
Type
thesis
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