Forms of Conflict: Byron's Influence on Yeats

Abstract

including the URL of the record and the reason for the withdrawal request. Forms of Conflict: Byron's Influence on Yeats From Yeats's earliest to his latest poetry, Byron looms large in Yeats's imagination. It is Byron's poetry of conflict, formal dexterity, political outspokenness, and, most crucially, his poetry of personality that offered a compelling model for Yeats, the aristocratically public poet. This article argues for the significance of Byron's influence on Yeats's poetry. Edward Larrissy and Steven Matthews have suggested the influence of Byron on Yeats, and Yeats himself avows the same to H. J. C. Grierson in a letter. 1 Yet there has been a relative dearth of studies that focus on their poetic kinship. This article shows that the Yeats-Byron bond, present from Yeats's early to his later poetry, involves a shared double manner, celebratory and mournful, where both poets fuse sardonic urbanity with imaginative felicity. Yeats's Romantic credentials have been long established. His elegy for lost time, 'Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931' proclaimed '[w]e were the last romantics', 2 (41) defining himself, if somewhat inaccurately, against that 'filthy modern tide' denounced in 'The Statues' (29). Yet the nature of Yeats's Romanticism is largely explored in the light of his self-anointed 'strong ghost[s]' ('A Prayer for my Son', 1), Shelley and Blake. George Bornstein's study compellingly showed the lines of influence stretching from Shelley to Yeats, and Harold Bloom's Yeats announced his agreement with Yeats's assessment of his career in Essays and Introductions, where Yeats wrote: 'When in middle life I looked back I found that he [Shelley] and not Blake, whom I had studied more and with more approval, had shaped my life'. 3 Yet Byron looms in the background, the Romantic poet who offered Yeats a model of strength. Yeats could draw power from an alliance with the older poet who claimed himself 'born for opposition'. 4 After reading H. J. C Grierson's collection of essays, 5 Yeats wrote to him: 'I am particularly indebted to you for your essay on Byron. My own verse has more and more adoptedseemingly without any will of minethe syntax and vocabulary of common 1 W. B. Yeats, letter to H.