The Case of W.B. Yeats: Mind, Nation and Literary Landscape

The emergence of the nation states was one of the fruits of Romanticism,and each reborn country needed to rediscover its identity: in Ireland, identitywas very much tied to the landscape and what remained of the Irish language,place-names playing a special role in the evocation of national desires.A study of these key texts of Yeats’ shows how his dedication to the life ofthe mind mirrored the loss of contact with the natural world. This is true of itslandscapes and its mythological figures. I hope to show that in an early poem“The Song of Wandering Aengus” that in developing an antithetical self, Yeatswas at significant times not only opposed to Nature intellectually andspiritually, but also emotionally. The privileging of the life of the mind over theanimal self has played in his own life and in his influence what may have been acostly division.