Browsing by Subject "Yeats’s critique of materialism"

This thesis is a study of William B. Yeats’s aesthetic theories as he formulated them at the end of the nineteenth century. The analysis of Yeats’s aesthetics brought forth in this thesis is particularly concerned with the political implications of said aesthetic system. Throughout this thesis, I argue that Yeats’s commitment to radical politics in the context of nineteenth-century Ireland’s struggle towards independence is reflected in his aesthetic formulations. More precisely, I intend to demonstrate how Yeats discarded, in these formulations, Ireland’s material struggles and instead constructed a metaphysical framework for Irish independence that allowed his own artistic enterprise to gain both a political and a metaphysical legitimacy. Instead of envisioning the conflict between Ireland and England in terms of who may gain control over Ireland’s economic and political apparatus, Yeats envisions it in terms of a struggle between two opposite philosophies. Ireland, in Yeats’s system, becomes a stand-in for a spiritual outlook on life, while England becomes a stand-in for nineteenth-century rationalism and positivism. Having reformulated the conflict along those lines, Yeats constructs an aesthetic system where art is bestowed with integrative and meaning-making powers that had until then be the sole preserve of religion. Great art, Yeats argue, is art that can reveal the hidden truths of the world, truths that he located in a noumenal realm. In Yeats’s aesthetic system, art infused with these hidden truths may harbour transformative powers. These powers allow in turn the emancipation of individuals. They constitute the perfect defence against what Yeats, among other writers, identified as the corrupting influence of modernity and decadence. The specificity of Yeats’s theories, I argue in this thesis, lies in his equating modernity with England. In his doing so, his aesthetics acquires an undeniably political dimension.