The essays collected in Emblems of Adversity: Essays on the Aesthetics of Politics in W. B. Yeats and Others hinge on the question of political articulation in Yeats’s poetry. Politics and history are paramount to our understanding of the Yeatsian poetic text. They are inextricable from the poet’s aesthetic philosophy. Yet politics manifests itself in a complex and complicated form in his work. It articulates itself both consciously and unconsciously. It is at once latent and manifest; appropriated and yet rejected; unambiguously announced in the title but immediately muffled in the corpus. Additionally, political articulation in Yeats’s poetry is multifarious, insofar as the biographical, the national and the historical are not only politicized but most often envisioned—apocalyptically—as emblems of adversity. To put it differently, ageing, Irish politics and modernity are synonymous with a Time transmogrifying “ancestral houses” into “ruins”—a Time “half dead at the top.” Self, Ireland and history are intermeshed in Yeats’s symbolism. They are inseparable from his worldview. His rage against ageing most often culminates in raging about the age—both modernity and Irish current reality. These essays trace Yeats’s aestheticization of politics right from the beginning of his poetic career, from his early pastoral innocence to the later modernist experience. Some of them examine Yeats comparatively with other modernists.
