An evolution of yeatsian poetics in fiction writing

Abstract

Refuting the existing Yeats scholarship that has considered W. B. Yeats’s fiction writing to be a mere steppingstone to completing his visionary poetics in his later years, this article aims at relocating his fiction writing within the context of his poetic evolution and discussing how he refined his visionary poetics through the commitment to mastering the craft of fiction. To that end, I examine the ways in which Yeats’s fiction writing is rooted not only in Irish tradition but also in European modernist tradition through the lens of his experiment in dealing with the Janus-faced temporality. I thus keep track of his development from a nationalist artist to a modernist par excellence and ultimately carve out a niche for reconsidering the importance of Yeats’s fiction writing.