The Reverse Side of the Mask: William Butler Yeats’ “Man and the Echo” and “The Circus Animals’ Desertion”

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Pages: 353-372
DOI: https://doi.org/10.54664/BOQW2433

Abstract:

The major notions which contributed to and underlay the emergence of Modernism, generally seen as a challenge to the ideological status quo of nineteenth – century Victorianism, can be clearly outlined in the later works of Nobel Prize winner, the Irish poet William Butler Yeats. The loss of objective representation in the text, the fracturing of its components into multiple fragments and speaking “I”-s (a strategy systematized in Yeats’s own theory of masks), the subversion of temporal and spatial settings, are all stylistic and structural innovations which put an emphasis on the subconscious areas of the human mind á la Freud or Jung. This article focuses on Yeats’s machinery of the “split personality”, widely explored on various intra-textual and inter-textual levels of meaning in his “death poems”, “Man and the Echo” and “The Circus Animals’ Desertion”. However, for all the fracturing dissonance and sporadic incoherence which characterized his fragmented later modernist texts, Yeats managed to achieve, through continual existential self-harmonisation and self-perfection, the long-coveted condition he repeatedly referred to and identified as Unity of Being.

Keywords:

William Butler Yeats, Modernism, last poems, “Man and the Echo”, “The Circus Animals’ Desertion”, split personality

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