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- handle: 10670/1.n5knlr
- hal: hal-04233933
- doi: 10.11647/OBP.0135.02
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W. B. Yeats Metre Prosody Modernism poetrySujets proches
Poems Poetry--Philosophy Poems Verses (Poetry) Vers libreCiter ce document
Hannah Sullivan, « How Yeats Learned to Scan », HAL-SHS : littérature, ID : 10.11647/OBP.0135.02
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Free verse was barely known in British and Irish poetry in the 1900s. By 1920, everywhere, both as a formal practice and an idea, even an ideology. Given that Yeats is the only major British or Irish poet in whose career 1910 could be seen as a midpoint, the free verse movement might be thought to have affected him more than anyone else. This article asks what effect it had on his metrical practice. Counterintuitively, it argues that Yeats became a more metrically scrupulous, constrained, and traditional poet as free verse flourished around him. This is true both when we compare revised poems to their original versions and when we compare new poems from the 1920s to their predecessors in the 1890s. The article concludes by asking why this might be and what, if any, ideological principles are at stake in Yeats's formal conservatism.