ENGL 362
Approaches to W. B. Yeats
Last Offered Spring 2017
Division I Writing Skills
This course is not offered in the current catalog

We will read the poetry and selected prose and plays of William Butler Yeats. Widely regarded as one of the most influential English-language poets of the twentieth century, Yeats was also a novelist, playwright, critic, autobiographer, and a founder of the Irish national theater. We will consider how his writings were shaped by, and responded to, the literary and political contexts of his time; how he conceived of authorial selfhood, its construction in language, and the functions of literature; and his transactions with his contemporaries (from Wilde to Pound to Auden). Applying a range of critical and theoretical approaches to his writings, and giving particular attention to textual materialism, we will study closely Yeats’s compositional process and his habits of repeated revision of published works, as well as his formal techniques.