ENGL6308 · English

Seminar: Yeats: Work, Thoughts, Contexts

Morrissey College of Arts & Sciences

W. B. Yeats, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923, was arguably the most important Irish poet ever to write in English. This course will include Yeats as a dramatist, a prose writer, and a thinker, but the major emphasis will be on his poetry. We will consider his work in its various social, political, and historical contexts, which include the cultural nationalism of the Irish Literary Revival, the Easter Rising of 1916, the Anglo-Irish War, the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922, and the political turmoil as the Europe of the 1930s moved towards war. We will also engage with a range of contemporary scholarship on Yeats.