Gender and History in Yeats's Love Poetry (Irish Studies)

This first full-length feminist treatment of Yeats shows how his experience of changes in the balance of power between men and women led him to expand the formal possibilities of love poetry. As a white, male, middle-class, Protestant citizen of the British Empire, with an acknowledged debt to canonical English writers, Yeats belonged to the dominant tradition. As a colonised Irishman, however, he was acutely conscious of repression and exclusion. Detailed examination of Yeats's work in the context of the formal conventions of love poetry and the history of the emancipation of women and the decolonisation of Ireland re-situated a private genre in a public context. Yeats's complex position in history and culture, his long obsession with a 'New Woman', his indeterminate gender identity and his constant remaking of his poetics all contribute to the power of his poetry to fascinate the reader.