' For Yeats, John O'Leary symbolises the selflessness and idealism of generation of Irish heroes – qualities which, in Yeats's opinion, are 'dead and gone.' .
The heroes of the past 'were of a different kind.' Their attitudes and values were fundamentally different from those of the merchants. Yeats speaks of those heroes whose names 'stilled' the 'childish play' of the middle-class people he now rebukes. These heroes had 'little time' to pray or save because they selflessly devoted their lives to the pursuit of a noble dream. The rhetorical question 'And what, God help us could they save?' suggests the dismissive reaction of the cold-eyed materialists to men who put little value on, not only money, but their own life's. Yeats's anger intensifies and reaches a climax in stanza 3. Yeats sadly concludes that the sacrifices of those heroes were in vain since they certainly did not die for the type of selfish cylical society of which he is so critical. While the heroes had a vision of a free Ireland, the merchants' vision does not extend beyond the till in front of them. The self-absorbed merchants' cannot understand, let alone appreciate, men who gave so much of themselves in pursuit of a nobble idea. .
In the closing stanza Yeats suggested that if the heroes of the past could somehow be recalled to the present, they would be dismissed as madmen, bewitched by the beautiful woman that was Ireland. Yeats believed that if these heroes would be mocked and denigrated in the Ireland of 1913. The merchants coldly act in their own self-interest. The poem ends on a particularly gloomy note. Yeats sadly concludes that if futile raising the memories of the heroic dead in the cynical and dispiriting climate of the early 20th century Ireland. .
In the poem 'Easter 1916' Yeats completely revises the views he expressed in 'September 1913'. In this poem he implicitly acknowledges that he misjudges the middle classes.
Based on the 1990 Prompt, reworked to apply to W.B. ... W.B. ... However, Yeats was disillusioned at the wide response and misinterpretation of his earlier works, as expressed in this poem to himself, "A Coat". ... Much of his earlier poetry reflected his attachment to his country, and he recounts these works within the lines of this particular poem. ... It is a personal slap in the face to the unnamed "fools". ...
Lawrence will probably remain among the most significant of the century; poets from Thomas Hardy and W.B. ... Above all, poetry was not statement or felt sensation, but 'art'. In 1899, Arthur Symons, one of the poetic 'aesthetes' of the 1890s, published his study The Symbolist Movement in Poetry, which would have great influence on modern poets like W.B. Yeats and T.S. ... Yeats himself quickly drew the lesson that 'We must purify poetry', which was to continue, through movements like Imagism and Vorticism, up to the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, the perio...