Rached Khalifa

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 ...

W. B. Yeats: A Poetics of Ideology investigates the articulations of ideology in Yeats from the beginning of his poetic career. The book seeks to contextualize this ideology within what I call “the modernist predicament.” Yeats’s articulation of politics can be divided into three major phases. The first focuses on his juvenilia, where politics is articulated in the pastoral trope at the unconscious level of the text. The second is explicitly expressed in Yeats’s “imaginative nationalism.” Here Ireland is painted as a utopian land, an extension of his early pastoral world. In such an idyllic depiction of the nation traumatic events like the Great Hunger are glossed over. The third phase grounds Yeats in the modernist predicament. Here the poet’s consciousness of the discrepancy between aesthetics and praxis, poetry and modernity, is paramount to our understanding of the Yeatsian crisis. The crisis articulates itself in Yeats’s politicization of space and claustrophilia. The book aims...