Ms. Perricone
English 4
Period 6
3/4/11
The Irish Rebellion of 1641, his mother reading Irish folktales to him as a child, and William Blake’s use of fiction influenced William Butler Yeats to write “The Curse of the Fire and the Shadows”. Yeats is a huge part of 20th century English and Irish literature and one of the most important writers that started the “Irish Literary Revival” and was responsible for starting a his own literary club called “The Rhymers Club”. In addition to being a great poet Yeats was always prominent in writing short stories and plays. One of Yeats’ individual characteristics is his split sense of certain situations. He was very spiritual and yet managed to cling to a skeptical sense of artistic …show more content…
The conflict arose when some Irish Catholics attempted a coup to overthrow the English administration. Their goal was to force them to allow the Catholics their basic religious rights. Although their coup failed it was the spark that started the Irish Rebellion of 1641 also known as the Irish confederate wars. A war that lasted from 1641 to 1649 and was fought in Ireland itself. The Irish fought with only about 5,000 soldiers against England’s army of 19,000. Despite the obvious advantage the English held, the Irish had managed to kill some 3,000 English and Scottish soldiers in the first battle of the war. Although the mainly Puritan English parliament had used yellow journalism to deceive the people of England and said that hundreds of thousands were murdered by the Irish catholic scum. Though this was just a political tactic employed by parliament to steal power away from King Charles I and sully his reputation as the king of England. Parliament distrusted him so much that they feared he would use the Irish against the Puritans in the English Civil war that begun in …show more content…
In 1880 due to financial problems, the family returned to Dublin and Yeats enrolled into Erasmus Smith High School. Then in 1883 he attended the Metropolitan School of Art. While attending college Yeats published his first two works that later appeared in the Dublin University Review. It was later in his college career that Yeats had made the decision to move on from his artistic career and further his abilities as an author. Since then he started writing poems on various themes and plays. His initial works were deeply influenced with the creations of great poet Percy B. Shelley, and later shifted towards pre-Raphaelite verse and Irish myth and traditions. In his maturing years, Yeats came to appreciate the writing of William Blake. A year later his family decided to make the move back to London. Yeats openly opposed the age of science and often concentrated more on the view astronomy. Yeats' interest in mysticism, spiritualism, astrology and occultism drew criticism from his colleagues who dismissed it as a lack of intellectuality. His first serious work, “The Isle of Statutes”, was a fantasy poem and was published in Dublin University Review. In 1886, he published a pamphlet Mosada: A Dramatic Poem followed by “The Wanderings of Orisin” and Other Poems, published in 1889. By 1890 Yeats was already an