The Poetry of W.B. Yeats: Style and Imagery

In order to study the different stages in the stylistic development of Yeats and his handling of imagery the present work has been divided into five main chapters. The first three chapters deal with the three distinct phases in his stylistic development and are entitled as ‘Early style’, ‘Middle style’ and ‘style in the Later poetry’ respectively. Generally Yeats’s poetic career has been divided into four phases-early, middle, later and last but in the present study the whole corpus of his poetry has been considered into three groups only because our emphasis is mainly on the stylistic features of his poetry. In each chapter an attempt has been made to correlate the themes with the different constituents of style such as language, music, rhythm and various poetic device etc. The discussion of the style in each of the three chapters is followed by a consideration of his imagery. The purpose is to underline the important images used in a particular phase and to show how their nature, like other constituents of style is determined by the themes and experience of life. The fourth chapter undertakes a discussion of some of the major images to show how they develop through various phases of Yeats’s mental and artistic development. The fifth and the last chapter is devoted to the study of Yeats’s main sources of imagery through the long run of his poetic activity. This will enable us to have an insight into the complex origin of the images revealing the quality and nature of Yeats’s experiences and associations. Finally, the concluding chapter attempts to sum up the achievement of Yeats in the context of style and imagery. In order to highlight the uniqueness of Yeats in this regard a brief of comparison with the practice of T.S. Eliot, one of the pillars of modernist poetry, is given.