“WE MAKE OUT OF THE QUARREL WITH OTHERS, RHETORIC, BUT OF THE QUARREL WITH OURSELVES, POETRY.” Stages of W. B. Yeats’s Representations of the Self
“WE MAKE OUT OF THE QUARREL WITH OTHERS, RHETORIC, BUT OF THE QUARREL WITH OURSELVES, POETRY.” Stages of W. B. Yeats’s Representations of the Self

Summary/Abstract: In his prose work, Per Amica Silentia Lunae, W. B. Yeats states that unlike the quarrel with the others, which becomes rhetoric, the quarrel with the self becomes poetry. It is well-known the fact that the Anglo-Irish poet, William Butler Yeats, has searched for a perfect poetic expression, throughout his entire life. Therefore, the volumes of poetry he conceived, the plays or the prose work bear his personal imprint and they are impregnated with the toil of a life time for reaching “a form as Grecian goldsmiths make/ Of hammered gold and gold enamelling/ To keep a drowsy Emperor awake; / Or set upon a golden bough to sing/ To lords and ladies of Byzantium/ Of what is past, or passing, or to come.” In other words, through the present paper, I intend to examine some of Yeats’s poems with the aim to demonstrate that each of them, as stages of his poetic creation and quarrels of his self, reflects the inner quarrel with his self in order to accomplish his desideratum asserted in Sailing to Byzantium.

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