著者

日下 隆平

出版者

桃山学院大学

雑誌

英米評論 (ISSN:09170200)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.12, pp.25-46, 1997-12-20

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The purpose of this paper is to investigate how social changes in the later nineteenth century had a great impact on Yeats, through his literary works. Yeats was brought up in the ancien regime: Victorian, Protestant, Ascendancy Ireland. The Ascendancy, here, represented the dominant Irish Protestant class. Some of them were Anglo-Irish absentee landlords of the ruling class. Yeats's family, which had a farm in Kildare, belonged to the Ascendancy, too. His youth spanned the period that inaugurated the decline of this Irish Ascendancy, as the outbreak of the Land War then shows. This paper is made up of three sections: In the first, Yeats's sensitivity to the times, such as the sense of an ending, is illuminated in such poems as "The Second Coming". In the second section, I make it clear that the apocalyptic vision which can be seen in the poem is derived from the decline of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy. In the last section, the process in which Yeats came to identify himself with Jonathan Swift is dealt with. Swift's Gulliver, who was isolated between Yahoo and Houhyhnhnm, represents a symbolic figure for the "Ascendancy which was both colonized and colonialist", to use Eagleton's words. Yeats regarded him as an example of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy and followed him.