Abstract
Shelley’s single vision presents, in his poetry, a characteristic landscape or imaginative frame of reference. In this study I trace Yeats’s creation of such a landscape and I argue that this landscape and the world system behind it are conceived as tragic. My study explores Yeats’s dance plays, the material which culminates in A Vision and Cuchulain, the hero who dominates Yeats’s world.
a single vision would have come to him again and again, a vision of a boat drifting down a broad river between high hills where there were caves and towers, and following the light of one Star; … and voices would have told him how there is for every man some one scene, some one adventure, some one picture that is the image of his secret life ….
(E&I, pp. 94–5)
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Notes
William Blake, Complete Writings, ed. G. Keynes (London: Oxford University Press, 1966) p. 217.
Helen Vendler, Yeats’s ‘Vision‘ and the Later Plays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963).
Balachandra Rajan in ‘Yeats, Synge and the Tragic Understanding’, Theatre and the Visual Arts: A Centenary Celebration of Jack Yeats and John Synge, Yeats Studies no. 2, ed. Robert O’Driscoll and Lorna Reynolds (Dublin: Irish University Press, 1972) p. 69.
Harold Bloom, Yeats (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970).
Jan Kott, The Eating of the Gods: An Interpretation of Greek Tragedy, tr. Boleslaw Taborski and Edward Czerwinski (London: Eyre Methuen, 1974) pp. ix–x.
Murray Krieger, The Tragic Vision (New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1960) p. 20.
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© 1987 Maeve Good
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Good, M. (1987). Introduction. In: W. B. Yeats and the Creation of a Tragic Universe. Macmillan Studies in Anglo-Irish Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-08246-9_1
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