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William Butler YeatsA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
“Bog Queen” by Seamus Heaney (1999)
One of Yeats’s primary heirs, Seamus Heaney also used Irish history and myth in his work. In this poem, Heaney also draws on the Bog Goddesses of Irish folklore, like Yeats does with the Hag figure. Also like Yeats’s Crazy Jane sequence, Heaney’s poem connects the female body to fecundity, the landscape, and a force that transcends death.
“The Mermaid (from The Sea Cabinet)“ by Caitriona O’Reilly
O’Reilly, a 21st century Irish poet, updates the selkie myth: Her mermaid is “part virgin, part harpy” (Line 5). The constructed mermaid here has been robbed of magic—the same way the Bishop attempts to disempower Jane—but the poem allows her reclaim some aspects of herself.
“The Ballad of Reading Gaol“ by Oscar Wilde (1898)
Irish poet Oscar Wilde used the ballad verse form for this long form poem chronicling crime and punishment because of its association with working class audiences. Besides their shared formal traits, both Wilde's and Yeats's poems address themes of violence, sexuality, and society’s apparatuses of judgment.
By William Butler Yeats
Among School Children
William Butler Yeats
A Prayer for My Daughter
William Butler Yeats
A Vision: An Explanation of Life Founded upon the Writings of Giraldus and upon Certain Doctrines Attributed to Kusta Ben Luka
William Butler Yeats
Cathleen Ni Houlihan
William Butler Yeats
Death
William Butler Yeats
Easter, 1916
William Butler Yeats
Leda and the Swan
William Butler Yeats
No Second Troy
William Butler Yeats
Sailing to Byzantium
William Butler Yeats
The Lake Isle of Innisfree
William Butler Yeats
The Second Coming
William Butler Yeats
The Wild Swans at Coole
William Butler Yeats
When You Are Old
William Butler Yeats
Beauty
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Challenging Authority
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Colonialism & Postcolonialism
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European History
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Modernism
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Modernist Poetry
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Mortality & Death
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Philosophy, Logic, & Ethics
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Power
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Pride & Shame
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Religion & Spirituality
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Short Poems
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