The Easter Rising proved that the spirit of the self-sacrificing patriotism was in fact very much alive in Ireland. It is to Yates's credit that he is prepared to admit that he was wrong in his assessment of the modern Ireland in general, and of the middle classes in particular.
In the first stanza Yeats passes some of the men who would later fight in the Easter Rising and sacrifice their lives for the cause of Irish freedom. Before the rising Yates did not take these Irish nationalists seriously. It seemed to the poets that these were unremarkable men leading routine lives. The repetition of 'polite meaningless words' suggests the distance between the poet and these middle-class political activists. Yeats did not think it worthwhile to engage these men in meaningful conversation. He had completely misread them. Yeats describes how he often had a laugh at their expense 'At the club.' He believed that he lived in a world of fools and that these men were simply posing as revolutionaries. The rising and the subsequent executions dramatically altered the poet's and the nation's attitude towards the rebels, and forever changed the course of Irish history. 'All changed, changed utterly: a terrible beauty is born.' Yeats was very much in two minds about the Rising. The beauty of the insurrection lay in the idealism and courage of the rebels, but the loss of human life and the fanatical instance on the need for a blood sacrifice gave this beauty a 'terrible' quality. Yeats is to be admired for his detached, balanced attitude towards the rising. .
Yeats pays tribute to the patriotism of the men in 1016, without being blind to the problematic aspects of the rising. The poem is clearly much more than a literacy flag-waving exercise. Yeats portrays the Easter Rising as the hugely important, but seriously complex, historical event that it is. .
He portrays Countess Markievicz as a well-intentioned uninformed revolutionary ( 'ignorant good-will').
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...
