W. B. Yeats’ Postmodern Apocalyptic View

W. B. Yeats’ Postmodern Apocalyptic View

MOHAMMADSHAHI, Soolmaz
EXIR, Mohammad

Key words: W. B. Yeats, deconstruction, postmodernism, apocalyptic ABSTRACT Postmodernism, a rather vague term, escapes any centralized framework attempting to define it. This might be the reason Derrida denied the attachment of any isms to his theories which construct one of the mainstream critical foundations of any postmodernist reading. In other words, defining certain techniques and frameworks to include or exclude a literary work into/from a defined postmodernist context is a flaw which questions the very foundations of postmodernism itself. Postmodernism might better be called a vogue, a stream, even an era rather than a specific movement, not an era ascribed to the post-world war period only, but to any era which goes beyond the accepted norms and conventions of the dominant discourse of its own time. In this regard, W.B. Yeats had a post modern apocalyptic vision which prophesied the upcoming of an age in which “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; /Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” Generally agreed, the antinomies in Yeats's poetry turns out to be reconciliation between the old hostilities of the good/bad, soul/flesh, etc., which attempts to arrive at a unity holding both parts. Yeats’s juxtaposing rather than reconciling the old vs. new ideas is a postmodern attitude. In this way, we might call Yeats as a poet who not only prophesied the coming of the postmodern era, but also a precursor of postmodernity in his verse as well as his apocalyptic work, A Vision. This paper is an attempt to analyze Yeats’s late poetry in the context of Derridean deconstruction and difference.

Article
PeerReviewed

IBU Publishing

2013-05-03

1993