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“ History and Myth in Yeats’ ‘Easter 1916'”
Terry Eagleton points out the argument of this essay: “the affirmative statement” with unresolved ambiguities in W.B. Yeats’ “Easter 1916.” Eagleton presents that the ambiguities are mainly related to the historical experience (insurrection, rebellion or uprising), which leads to the discussion of the poem as the myth-creation.
According to Eagleton, the myth-creation is a way to qualify the position of the dead instead of involving the moral primacy or objective validity of the position of the dead (rebels or heroes). In other words, the myth-creation is to mythologize and to create its own reality, which might be alienated from the external reality. However, the tension between myth and history still exists and is central to the meaning of this poem. In this poem, Yeats demonstrates the duality of the mythic affirmation and the historical uneasiness through the transformation of imagery. At the same time, the reality which the poem implies is dissolved and re-ordered by a new term or imagery in the poem; furthermore, Eagleton offers a question of “whether the transformations are subjective or objective” (356). The question of subjective and objective, according to Eagleton’s discussion, is that Yeats does not fairly clarify the vague relation between their close juxtaposition. Yeats’s conflicting attitude or the ambiguities revealed in the poem, as Eagleton’s conclusion, reflects the “guilt” toward Easter Rising in two folds: the outsider and the participator at the same time
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