W. B. Yeats and the Quest for Order
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This paper is an attempt to explore Yeats’s quest for order and how this quest found expression in his works. Throughout his life, Yeats was dissatisfied with the religious, artistic, political, anthropological and intellectual aspects of life, in both Ireland and England which have taken away from modern man the sense of order. His father's skepticism, his dissatisfaction with the spiritless religion of his time, a religion which seems dead and his sense of alienation at school among British students were behind his ceaseless search for alternative orders which became the preoccupation of all his life and triggered his [] engagements in numerous nationalistic, occult, and mystical societies which he joined early in his life. Among the societies he joined was the Balvatsky Lodge of the Russian lady Madam Balvatsky through which he came into close contact with the occult. One of the most important societies he joined and presided was the occult society the Golden Dawn. This paper, therefore, sheds light on his quest for nationalist, intellectual, philosophical, and mystical orders and how this is reflected in his poetry. The paper attempts to explore this quest for order selected poems such as "The Lake Isle of Innisfree", "The Second Coming", "Leda and the Swan", "Sailing to Byzantium" and some other poems together with reference to his philosophical book A Vision. However, the dominating quest in Yeats's poetry is his quest for a mystical order which can be traced in almost all his poetical works.
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