routledge+history+of+literature+in+english

366 The twentieth century: 1900–45
The concern is with the new Ireland, and its future; the poet ‘returns’
to the holy city of Byzantium as a symbol of artistic/creative perfection.
The concern with the passing of time, a major concern in many
Modernist writers, becomes clear in the poem’s last line, which speaks
‘Of what is past, or passing, or to come’.
In the final phase of his career, Yeats reconciles elements from both
his earlier periods, fusing them into a mature lyricism. The poetry is less
public and more personal. He develops his theories of contraries and
of the progression which can result from reconciling them, but he also
writes about the eternity of art, producing in the process many memorable
poems which have come to be seen as having enduring value. The later
poems explore contrasts between physical and spiritual dimensions to
life, between sensuality and rationality, between turbulence and calm.
Yeats’s Among School Children (also from The Tower) places the ‘sixtyyear-old
smiling public man’, now a senator in the newly independent
Ireland, among the new generation. His own uncertainties dominate
the later poems, until his final words, in Under Ben Bulben (1938),
when he instructs the younger generation of Irish writers:
Irish poets, learn your trade,
Sing whatever is well made.
Like T.S. Eliot, Yeats creates a modern idiom for poetry, particularly
in merging formal and colloquial styles. He adheres, however, more
strictly to traditional forms than Eliot and is more comfortable than his
contemporary with the direct expression of a personal self. He is less
ironic and less distrustful of Romanticism than Eliot. He is also less
willing than Eliot to embrace a single religious vision.
T.S. ELIOT
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
(What the Thunder Said, from The Waste Land)
The ruins created across Europe as a result of the First World War enter the
world of T.S. Eliot’s poetry indirectly. There is little direct reference to the