W.B. Yeats and the Importance of Imagination Essay -- Biography Biogra

W.B. Yeats and the Importance of ImaginationThe poetry of the Irish writer WB Yeats celebrates how the gentlemane imagination gives meaning to lifes struggles. Yeatss vision of human fictive power evolves with his writing, broadening from count oning the imagination as the form of human desires to understanding the power of the imagination to inspire others and immortalize the creative spirit. Yeatss work, by embracing this power, embraces the human condition itself, giving dignity to hardships and wo(e) by transfiguring dread into tragedy. The inevitable suffering described in poems like tours Curse, The red Swans at Coole, and The Circus Animals Desertion, is transfigured into works of art which immortalize the human spirit, as in The Lake Isle of Innisfree, A Dialogue of Self and Soul, and Lapis Lazuli. In Yeats poems, human life is an experience wrought with sorrow and suffering. Adams Curse, for example, defines the human condition in terms of the twin hardships of labor and mortality. Just as the Biblical Adam was cursed with toil and death when he was exiled from Eden, all slew in Adams Curse must struggle to live, only to ultimately die. Like the former(a) pauper who must scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones to survive, all people labor in life, especially when making a work of cup of tea the poet, for example, works hours at stitching and unstitching lines in order to create pleasantness sounds, only to be called an idler, and every woman is born...to know that she must promote to be beautiful. The curse of labor is made more bearable when it informs the mental institution of beauty, as in a poem, a womans sweet and low voice, or a love...compounded of high courtesy, but the curs... ...g the inflexible realities of life, Yeatss works come to advise the greater powers of the creative soul to inspire others to embrace their own suffering, to see and balance all parts of the human experience and transfigure change surface hardship in to art. The imagination thus empowers man to defy with his spirit what his soundbox cannot- he finds spiritual timelessness, perfection, and immortality in a world where he forget decay, fail, and perish. It is the imagination which allows this discovery, transfiguring the deepest anguish of bounded life into free and eternal gaiety. whole works CitedFinneran, Richard, ed. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats. 2nd ed. New York Scribner, 1997.Frye, Northrop. The Educated Imagination.Bloomington Indiana University Press, 1964.Parkinson, Thomas. W.B. Yeats The later Poetry. University of California Press Berkeley,1964.