Date of Award
5-2016
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts (MA)
College/School
College of Humanities and Social Sciences
Department/Program
English
Thesis Sponsor/Dissertation Chair/Project Chair
Jonathan Greenberg
Committee Member
Adam Rzepka
Committee Member
Jeffrey Miller
Abstract
This thesis examines the interplay of poetry and philosophy in the work of William Butler Yeats as it serves to ground a symbolic structure that challenges time. Yeats, like his contemporaries, was influenced by Walter Pater, who made it possible to articulate with passion a sense of being despite life’s tumult and upheaval, to instantiate and develop in a moment a complete, poetic soul. It is in this same spirit that, much later, Gaston Bachelard would approach poetic memory for its harmonizing value. The works of Pater and Bachelard thus ground a phenomenological reading of Yeats’s poetry, in particular “The Tower” and “Meditations in Time of Civil War,” that serve to better grasp the nature of Yeats’s endeavor to construct a symbolic system that is at once philosophical and actualizing. It is at this intersection of philosophy and poetry that the act of writing becomes an intervention against the notion of time and ultimately, the death of the poet.
File Format
Recommended Citation
Lang, Peter Michael, "Toward a Phenomenological Poetics : The Interplay of Philosophy and Poetry in William Butler Yeats’s “The Tower” and “Meditations in Time of Civil War”" (2016). Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects. 452.
https://digitalcommons.montclair.edu/etd/452