Chesney Evert L&S Arts & Humanities
“All Changed, Changed Utterly:” W.B. Yeats and the Poetry of War
In 1915, the Irish poet W.B. Yeats mailed a poem to his friend, a six-line declaration of abstention from writing any war poetry. Not a year after Yeats enshrined his own vow of silence in verse, however, he wrote some of the most famous war poems in the history of the English language. It is against the backdrop of this negotiation—to stay silent, to write of war—that my research seeks to analyze the poet’s role in wartime and its transformation since the early 20th century.
Reading poetry as a self-revelatory practice of witness and examining the genesis of “war poetry” as a genre, I will closely read Yeats’ war poems alongside a survey of relevant poetry from the period to interrogate how the poet’s relationship to conflict manifests in their work. I will center this analysis around the concept of distance from the battlefront; the Great War’s “soldier-poet” writing from the trenches, the civilian poet’s response, and collective efforts to elegize. Focusing on the alteration of the war poet as a figure across time, period-specific criticism and literary theory will shed new light on a transhistorical question: what are the stakes of making art, writing poetry, during war?
Message To Sponsor
I want to express my deepest gratitude to those who made this research possible. It means the world to have the resources to write, read, and think across time and space when so much in the realm of research funding is uncertain. The study of literature in any particular moment can help us access and make sense of our world: in reading war poetry, I ask how it responds to atrocity and what it has the capacity to do in violent times. Thank you for giving me the space to ask these questions.