Compare & contrast between Eliot and Yeats
Introduction: W.B Yeats and T.S Eliot dominated the first half of the 20th century. In W.B. Yeats two generations of poetry met. He wrote his earlier poems under the influence of the romanticists, like Spenser, Shelley, Rossetti and particularly of the late Victorian romantic escapists. The second stage of Yeats’s poetry comprises his symbolic and mystical poems, like The Wandering of Oisin and The Wind among the Reeds. Yeats realized that poetry had to be adjusted to the changes of his time, and this he achieved in and individual way. Through Blake and Siedenborg he found a metaphysical approach. Some of the sources he employed magic and the like seemed unworthy, but the poetic results were of profound beauty. Apart from this philosophical change much else was happening. He was profoundly moved by the ‘troubles’ in Ireland, which resulted in the Easter rebellion, as is seen in poems such as ‘Easter 1916’. He stands out as the greatest poetical figure of the first half of the tw...