Abstract

This study argues that Yeats's unique concept of tragedy is an aesthetic/philosophical construct that informs his poetic enterprise. Further, it contends that Yeats is a modern tragic poet and his art a representation of the modern tragic vision. Because this vision is so intimately related to Nietzsche's ideas, his profound and inestimable influence on Yeats's understanding of the tragic is a central concern. Since this is an interpretive and not an influence study, Nietzsche's ideas are related to Yeats's poetry and theory through the dialectical method of intertexualism. This examination is organized around Yeats's three central, interrelated aesthetic issues: the function of poetry, the role of the poet in an antagonistic society, and his lifelong quest to understand the nature of reality. ;This study spans Yeats's entire opus: from his early Wind Among the Reeds volume to Last Poems, including relevant plays and essays. It begins by examining the tragic in Yeats from both a critical and philosophical context and places Yeats in the "New Tradition," a non-Aristotelian, modern tradition of tragedy, beginning with Hegel and most recently including the work of Murray Kreiger. ;The central body of this study explores the "change" in Yeats during his middle period. Though not "creative" in poetic production, it was a period of strenuous aesthetic and philosophical exploration initiated and informed by his reading of Nietzsche in 1902. Yeats's new positions are explored in depth through his essay collection The Cutting of the Agate and poetry volume Responsibilities. During this period the image of the poet undergoes substantial transformation. Using Nietzsche's character of Zarathustra as a type, this study examines Yeats's significant reformulation of the poet into a modern tragic figure: the poet as beggar, vagabond, "the little tramp." ;Last Poems reveals Yeats's modern tragic stance in tragic gaiety--the apotheosis of the aesthetic and spiritual crisis informing his effort. His mature art self-reflexively questions its own authority as it affirms the imaginative act. Ironic, bitter, and joyful, tragic gaiety epitomizes Yeats's final vision and places him at the cutting edge of modernism