By Dr Oliver Tearle ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’ stands, in many ways, as W. B. Yeats’s swansong. It was the final major poem published in his last volume of poems, which appeared the year before he died in 1939. But what is ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’ about? The poem doesn’t […]
By Dr Oliver Tearle ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’ is one of W. B. Yeats’s best-known poems: it is simultaneously both a war poem and a poem about Irishness, and yet, at the same time, neither of these. To unpick these paradoxes, a bit of analysis of the poem […]
By Dr Oliver Tearle W. B. Yeats (1865-1939) wrote ‘Easter 1916’ in the summer of 1916, shortly after the Easter Rising in Dublin and when the events were still fresh in the memory. Yeats had conflicted feelings towards the rising – more details about which can be read here – […]
The greatest poems by W. B. Yeats selected by Dr Oliver Tearle W. B. Yeats (1865-1939) was a prolific Irish poet, but what were his best poems? It’s going to prove difficult to restrict our choices to just ten of Yeats’s greatest poems, as there are bound to be notable […]
An analysis of a short Yeats poem by Dr Oliver Tearle ‘Death’ is not perhaps numbered among the most famous poems by W. B. Yeats (1865-1939), but it is probably the shortest of all his finest poems. In just a dozen lines, Yeats examines human attitudes to death, contrasting them […]