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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Responsibilities, and other poems," W. B. Yeats presents a profound exploration of the tension between personal desire and social obligation, reflecting the complexities of the human condition in early 20th-century Ireland. The collection showcases Yeats's mastery of imagery and rhythm, adopting a more modernist approach compared to his earlier works. Transitioning from the romanticism of his youth, Yeats crafts a poignant response to contemporary issues, utilizing symbols and allegory to delve into themes of love, aging, and the struggle for identity amidst shifting societal landscapes. W. B. Yeats (1865-1939), a towering figure in modern literature, was deeply influenced by the political tumult and cultural revival of his time. His involvement with the Irish Literary Revival and the Theosophical movement shaped his worldview, enriching his poetic voice with philosophical and spiritual undertones. Yeats's personal experiences, including his tumultuous relationships and his fascination with folklore, similarly inform his poignant reflections on existential themes in this collection. "Responsibilities, and other poems" is a must-read for those seeking a nuanced understanding of the intersection between the individual and the collective. Yeats invites readers into a reflective journey that challenges prevailing norms, making this work both a literary treasure and a profound commentary on the human experience. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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Responsibilities, and other poems
Table of Contents
Introduction
This volume presents a single-author gathering that marks a decisive turn in W. B. Yeats’s career, bringing together poems and a dramatic work that confront the pressures of public life alongside the claims of art. Rather than a complete or retrospective corpus, it is a curated selection shaped by the theme named in its title: the burdens and privileges of responsibility. Composed in the crucible of Ireland’s early twentieth-century cultural life, these pieces show Yeats refashioning his voice, calibrating lyric intensity to civic urgency, and testing the poet’s role as witness, critic, participant, and maker of lasting form.
The contents belong primarily to lyric poetry in varied modes: public addresses, personal lyrics, epigrams, dramatic monologues, and short sequences that pair or echo one another across the book. Songs appear both as independent pieces and as fragments linked to dramatic projects, and there is a notable inclusion of a stage play that extends the volume’s concerns into theatrical form. Occasional poems speak directly to events and institutions, while imitations and adaptations signal Yeats’s dialogue with European tradition. The result is a compact yet heterogeneous collection that displays the reach of his art across lyric, song, and drama.
These works were shaped by the turbulence of Yeats’s cultural moment. The titles themselves point to real controversies and civic debates, from the storm around a modern play’s reception to disputes over public patronage of the arts and the place of universities in national life. Such pieces do not merely register events; they examine the ethical and imaginative stakes of public action. At the same time, the poems of private address keep company with those interventions, reminding readers that historical pressure and inner life share a common air, and that the poet’s voice must answer to both.
A striking feature of the collection is the adjustment of style. Yeats’s earlier dreamlike textures give way here to a sparer, harder surface: plainer nouns, tauter syntax, and a willingness to risk direct statement. Irony sharpens; argument compresses. This is not a retreat from symbol and myth but their redeployment under stricter discipline. The poems achieve resonance by setting the emblematic against the everyday, and the ceremonial against the colloquial, creating a register that can speak to public quarrels without surrendering lyric authority or metaphysical reach.
Responsibility is the keystone theme: responsibility of citizens to art, of artists to citizens, and of the individual to unyielding inner standards. The collection weighs patronage against principle, crowd sentiment against cultural stewardship, and the consolations of myth against the urgencies of the present. It probes how convictions hold or falter under pressure, how praise can flatter or corrode, and how integrity is kept when expedience beckons. Without offering neat resolutions, the poems dramatize difficult choices, insisting that public conscience and artistic conscience are not separable tasks but contending claims on the same soul.
The theatre is a recurring vantage point. Yeats, closely involved with institutional drama, writes as someone who knows both the craft of performance and the frictions of public reception. Mask and persona, rehearsal and display, rehearsal and display, are not merely metaphors but working principles. In poems that invoke theatres and players, the book explores the distinction—and entanglement—between what is acted and what is lived. The stage becomes a testing ground for truthfulness, showing how an artist’s public face can both reveal and protect, and how the civic arena itself often behaves like a theatre of competing roles.
Alongside public speech stand poems of love, aging, memory, and craft. Their tone is measured rather than confessional, placing feeling under formal pressure. Figures recur—woman as emblem, city as moral landscape, youth as a vanished standard—to test the limits of idealization. Themes of renunciation and self-fashioning emerge, especially in brief lyrics that reassess what must be worn, set aside, or remade to keep faith with the art. The collection’s short, song-like pieces show how levity and gravity can share a stanza, and how wit, when compressed, can carry a serious reckoning with time.
The visionary strain remains unmistakable. Even in its most civic-minded poems, the book admits sudden irruptions of the strange and the numinous: apparitions that challenge complacency, symbols that open onto metaphysical vistas, rituals and presences that test modern skepticism. Such moments are not ornament but structure, disclosing a world where spiritual pressure can fall with the swiftness of weather. The negotiation between seen and unseen—between historical fact and imaginative second sight—animates the collection’s most searching passages and links it to the broader arc of Yeats’s lifelong symbolic enterprise.
Formally, the volume is architected by sequences, pairings, and strategic contrasts. Poems set side by side answer one another across tone and subject, and recurring numerals signal deliberate twinnings that complicate any single reading. Occasional brackets and rubrics mark turns in emphasis, while the presence of a play at the close widens the compass from lyric interiority to enacted dialogue. That dramatic work does not break the book’s unity; it completes a circuit, placing in bodies and voices the questions the lyrics raise, and allowing ethical argument to unfold in the space of action.
Language here moves between ceremonial cadence and adamant plainness. Regular stanza shapes and firm rhyme anchor a rhetoric of address—often to a specific person or group—while quick turns of phrase, refrain-like reprises, and exact nouns keep the poems grounded. Yeats’s engagement with earlier European poets, signaled by imitation, shows a writer extending lineage rather than merely declaring independence. All the while, Irish places, institutions, and quarrels lend the diction a local pressure that resists abstraction, allowing tradition and immediacy to meet on the page without diminishing either.
As a whole, these works endure because they chart a path for modern poetry that neither retreats from history nor dissolves into it. The volume forges a public lyric capable of argument, rebuke, and praise, yet maintains the inwardness that sustains art beyond the day’s controversy. Its tightened style, ethical poise, and symbolic depth have remained touchstones for readers seeking a poetry equal to civic trial and private reckoning alike. In tracing the demands art makes on the self—and the demands the world makes on art—the collection continues to speak with undiminished authority.
The purpose of presenting this selection together is to let its arguments be heard as a continuous discourse. Read sequentially, the poems and the play develop a conversation about agency, taste, belief, and the costs of conviction, each piece taking a different angle on what the title names. The arrangement rewards attentive rereading: motifs return altered, positions are tested, and the voice itself becomes a record of self-scrutiny. For new readers and those returning, the book offers not a museum of set pieces but a living set of challenges—articulate, exacting, and still urgent.
Author Biography
William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) was an Irish poet and dramatist, a central figure in the Irish Literary Revival and a pioneer who bridged late Romanticism and modernism. Co‑founder of Dublin’s Abbey Theatre and the first Irish Nobel laureate in literature (1923), he shaped both national culture and international poetry. Across five decades he created lyrics, verse dramas, and essays that fused Irish myth, occult symbolism, and acute political and personal reflection. From early Celtic twilight atmospheres to the taut ironies of his late work, Yeats’s career shows a rare evolution in range and ambition, making him one of the most influential poets in English.
Yeats was educated in Dublin and spent formative periods in London, moving between the two literary scenes in the late nineteenth century. He attended art school in Dublin, where visual training sharpened his sense of emblem and symbol. Early reading of Shelley, Spenser, and William Blake, along with the Pre‑Raphaelites, shaped his taste for romance and ornate diction. Encounters with Irish folklore collectors and nationalist thinkers encouraged him to mine myth and legend for contemporary meanings. The veteran activist John O’Leary, in particular, urged him toward cultural nation‑building rather than agitational politics, a distinction that would mark Yeats’s early poems and essays.
In the 1880s and 1890s Yeats published his first major poems and tales, establishing a dreamlike, symbol‑laden style. The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems announced his mythic ambition, while The Celtic Twilight gathered essays and sketches that popularized supernatural lore. He edited and introduced anthologies of Irish folk material, helping frame a literary revival that reached audiences in Ireland and Britain. Collections such as The Rose and The Wind Among the Reeds refined his music and introduced recurring emblems—rose, swan, and tower—that he would rework for decades. During this period he also began writing verse drama drawn from heroic and legendary subjects.
Committed to building a national stage, Yeats collaborated with like‑minded writers to found the Abbey Theatre in the early 1900s and served as a guiding figure there for many years. He promoted new Irish drama and wrote plays that blended ritual with speech, including The Countess Cathleen, Cathleen ni Houlihan (with Lady Gregory), The King’s Threshold, and Deirdre. He defended the theatre’s artistic independence during controversies and championed younger dramatists. Experiments in staging and chant drew on non‑realist traditions, anticipating later modernist theatre. The Abbey became a durable institution and a platform where Yeats could test his belief that art could renew public life.
Beyond theatre, Yeats pursued esoteric studies that fed his symbolism. He joined occult and mystical societies in the 1890s and developed a personal system of images and historical cycles later articulated in A Vision. The inward turn sharpened, rather than softened, his style: Responsibilities signaled a harder, more ironic voice; The Wild Swans at Coole and Michael Robartes and the Dancer joined private meditation to public upheaval. His lyrics balanced chant‑like cadence with terse epigram, and his critical prose argued for a disciplined, impersonal craft. By the early 1920s he had reinvented himself as a modern poet without abandoning mythic frameworks.
The political crises of Ireland entered his verse in measured, memorable ways. Easter, 1916 commemorated the Rising with ambivalence and admiration, and Meditations in Time of Civil War reflected on violence and order. He served as a senator in the Irish Free State during the early to mid‑1920s, speaking on culture and education. In 1923 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature, cited for inspired poetry that gave expression to a nation’s spirit. Later collections—The Tower and The Winding Stair and Other Poems—brought many of his most quoted poems, confronting age, desire, authority, and historical fate with a new, chiselled austerity.
In his final years Yeats continued to write plays and striking late lyrics, including sequences that tested decorum and comic bitterness. Purgatory offered a stark, compressed drama, while late poems widened his international readership. He died in 1939 on the Mediterranean coast and was later reinterred in County Sligo, the landscape that nourished his imagination. His legacy endures in the canon of modern poetry and in the continued activity of the Abbey Theatre. Scholars and readers return to his work for its fusion of myth and modernity, its formal invention, and its searching reflections on history, art, and the self.
Historical Context
Responsibilities and Other Poems appeared from the Cuala Press in 1914, then in an expanded trade edition from Macmillan in 1916. Written largely between 1907 and 1914, the book announces Yeats’s turn from the soft light of the Celtic Twilight toward a harder, public voice. Its famous motto, In dreams begins responsibility, signals an ethic that binds imagination to civic consequence. The collection gathers lyrics, dramatic songs, and occasional poems that address theatre riots, labor strife, municipal arts funding, and the pressures of sectarian politics, while also retaining Yeats’s symbolic landscape of kings, beggars, hermits, and visionary figures.
The Irish Literary Revival formed the broad cultural backdrop to these poems. Founded on organizations such as the Gaelic League (1893) and the National Theatre Society (1902), it culminated in the opening of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 1904, under Yeats, Lady Gregory, and J. M. Synge. The Revival sought to recover Irish speech, folklore, and myth while creating a modern national literature. Responsibilities belongs to the phase when that movement faced urban crowds, inspectors, and politicians, and when Yeats, its most visible spokesman, refashioned inherited myths into instruments for judging public life as well as private passion.
The constitutional crisis over Irish Home Rule saturates the book’s political air. The Third Home Rule Bill was introduced on 11 April 1912 and passed in September 1914, its operation suspended by the war. Ulster resistance hardened under Sir Edward Carson and the signing of the Ulster Covenant in 1912; the Ulster Volunteer Force formed in 1913 and landed guns at Larne in April 1914. Nationalists formed the Irish Volunteers in November 1913. The Curragh incident of March 1914 exposed cracks in British authority. Yeats’s poems register the fragmentation of loyalties and the danger of faction that these events heralded.
Dublin’s Lockout of 1913, running from late August 1913 to early 1914, pitched the Irish Transport and General Workers Union of James Larkin against employers led by William Martin Murphy. Clashes on Sackville Street, including Bloody Sunday on 31 August 1913, left lasting scars. Yeats’s September 1913 laments bourgeois piety and starveling heroics alike, a view both elegiac and caustic. That social crisis refracts across other attacks on philistinism and moralizing committees in the volume. The poems weigh the cost of civic virtue when it shrinks to narrow thrift, and test whether heroic memory can survive a commercial city.
Another battlefront was the Dublin Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, founded by Hugh Lane in 1908. Lane’s proposals for a permanent gallery, including the famous plan to site a temporary structure on a bridge over the Liffey, met resistance from the Dublin Corporation. In 1913 the corporation refused to accept his conditional bequest of French pictures. Yeats campaigned for Lane and for public taste equal to modern painting. A poem chiding a wealthy man for his hedged promises speaks to this quarrel. Lane’s death on the Lusitania on 7 May 1915 intensified disputes over his pictures and Dublin’s cultural ambition.
The Playboy riots of January 1907 set the pattern for later conflicts. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, premiered at the Abbey Theatre on 26 January, drew protests from nationalist and Catholic audiences, many organized by the Ancient Order of Hibernians, over language and alleged immorality. Yeats defended Synge, whose death on 24 March 1909 left a void at the Abbey. The Attack on the Playboy revisits that storm. The episode sharpened Yeats’s sense that modern art would be tried in the court of the street, that the theatre itself had to become a school of freedom.
The rural backdrop to many lyrics includes the Land War’s aftershocks. The United Irish League’s campaigns, the Wyndham Land Act of 1903, and the ranch wars and cattle driving of 1906 to 1909 shifted ownership and unsettled custom, especially in Connacht and Munster. Yeats moved among the Anglo-Irish gentry through Lady Gregory at Coole Park, where houses were both repositories of culture and targets for intimidation. Poems recalling a house shaken by agitation, or stock figures of beggars on country roads, transform social turbulence into parable, linking modern disturbance with the older violences embedded in Irish legend.
Clerical nationalism and moral vigilance shadow the volume. By 1909 the Ancient Order of Hibernians, led by Joseph Devlin, dominated the Irish Parliamentary Party. Vigilance committees, formed around 1911, agitated against what they called immoral literature and policed the theatre. The National University of Ireland, founded in 1908 with colleges in Dublin, Cork, and Galway, became a terrain of sectarian organization when students joined fraternal orders. Yeats resisted this clerical temper, defending a secular, cosmopolitan culture. Poems that name the Abbey, address students, or rebuke bad poets turn institutional skirmishes into a general indictment of timid, puritan taste.
