W.B. Yeats and the Importance of Imagination Essay -- Biography Biogra

W.B. Yeats and the Importance of ImaginationThe poetry of the Irish writer WB Yeats celebrates how the merciful imagination gives meaning to lifes struggles. Yeatss vision of human creative military force evolves with his writing, broadening from seeing the imagination as the embodiment of human desires to understanding the power of the imagination to inspire others and immortalize the creative spirit. Yeatss work, by embracing this power, embraces the human condition itself, giving dignity to hardships and suffering by transfiguring dread into tragedy. The inevitable suffering draw in poems like Adams Curse, The Wild Swans at Coole, and The Circus Animals Desertion, is transfigured into whole caboodle of art which immortalize the human spirit, as in The Lake Isle of Innisfree, A Dialogue of ego and Soul, and Lapis Lazuli. In Yeats poems, human life is an experience wrought with sorrow and suffering. Adams Curse, for example, defines the human condition in terms of the twin hard ships of labor and mortality. Just as the biblical Adam was offensed with toil and death when he was exiled from Eden, all people in Adams Curse must struggle to live, only to ultimately die. Like the out of date pauper who must scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones to survive, all people labor in life, especially when making a work of beauty the poet, for example, works hours at stitching and unstitching lines in order to create sweet sounds, only to be called an idler, and every woman is born...to know that she must labour to be beautiful. The curse of labor is made more bearable when it informs the creation of beauty, as in a poem, a womans sweet and low voice, or a love...compounded of high courtesy, solely the curs... ...g the inflexible realities of life, Yeatss works come to appreciate the greater powers of the creative soul to inspire others to embrace their own suffering, to see and balance all parts of the human experience and transfigure even hardship into art. Th e imagination thus empowers man to defy with his spirit what his body cannot- he finds spiritual timelessness, perfection, and immortality in a domain where he will decay, fail, and perish. It is the imagination which allows this discovery, transfiguring the deepest anguish of bounded life into free and eternal gaiety. Works CitedFinneran, Richard, ed. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats. 2nd ed. New York Scribner, 1997.Frye, Northrop. The Educated Imagination.Bloomington inch University Press, 1964.Parkinson, Thomas. W.B. Yeats The Later Poetry. University of California Press Berkeley,1964.