![]() ![]() ![]() In the work, Yeats uses the fourteen lines of the traditional sonnet form in a radical, modernist style. “Leda and the Swan” has been considered one of the most technically masterful poems ever written in English. It has also been suggested that the poem, which was first written (and later revised in this present form) during the Irish Civil War of 1922–1923, is intended to draw attention to the violence that beset Yeats’s homeland during that time. It can be seen as a poem about the way a single event is to be understood as part of a larger scheme the result of the god’s assault on Leda is the birth of Helen of Troy, the subsequent destruction of early Greek civilization, and the beginning of the modern era. ![]() “Leda and the Swan” is a violent, sexually explicit poem that has all of the lyricism and complexity of Yeats’s later work, with its plain diction, rhythmic vigor, and allusions to mystical ideas about the universe, the relationship of human and divine, and the cycles of history. ![]() William Butler Yeats’s daring sonnet describing the details of a story from Greek mythology-the rape of Leda by the god Zeus in the form of a swan-was written at the height of the poet’s career, the same year he received the Nobel Prize for literature. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |