I actually thought the lecture was great. This is one of my favorite poems, and I always enjoy reading articles or hearing lectures about it. To be sure, every scholar has his or her own fascinating interpretation, and I felt the lecturer provided some insights I had never heard before. Well done!
IRISH literature NOT British! Yeats worked so hard to identify as Irish, but he was born English. But this is Yeats and part of the Irish Literary Renaissance.
Yeats is certainly Irish. However, I recorded this lecture while teaching a "British Literature" course. I know it's terrible, but in America both English and Irish literature are taught in a pair of undergraduate courses titled "British Literature I & British Literature II." When I say "British Literature," I am referring to our courses rather than Yeats's actual heritage or nationality.
Richard McWilliams, perhaps the term British is used a bit too loosely in one place, but you should certainly watch the entire video before you comment. Yeats' spirituality is examined in some depth and never is he described as "Christian."
Yeats might have called himself an esoteric or gnostic Christian. I believe that some aspects of the poem reflect his justified disapproval of Alexander "Aleister" Crowley.
No, he didn't. The 'collective unconscious' is purely Jung. "Collective unconscious, term introduced by psychiatrist Carl Jung to represent a form of the unconscious (that part of the mind containing memories and impulses of which the individual is not aware) common to mankind as a whole and originating in the inherited structure of the brain. It is distinct from the personal unconscious, which arises from the experience of the individual. According to Jung, the collective unconscious contains archetypes, or universal primordial images and ideas." www.britannica.com/science/collective-unconscious (Cited 22.02.20)
It is not British literature, it is Irish literature, written in English yes but Yeats was an Irishman. Britian refers to the island that is comprised of England, Scotland, and Wales, and each of those countries has its own literature, Ireland is a seperate country. Also Yeats was not what you would call a Christian
