Yeats's early lake isles

Journal article

W. B. Yeats’s successful early poem, ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’, reflects a general imaginative preoccupation with lakes in his writings as a young man. The poem shows evidence of the poet’s reading in both the local history of W. G. Wood-Martin’s History of Sligo (1882) and Irish mythological studies. Besides these sources, it draws (like other early material) on a symbolic geography of lakes, rivers, and seas which comes to Yeats from P. B. Shelley’s ‘Alastor’ and Walter Scott’s The Lady of the Lake. This geography is to be seen in Yeats’s very early work, such as ‘The Island of Statues’ (1884), and it influences longer-running projects such as the poetic drama The Shadowy Waters through the 1890s. Other early poems, ‘The Stolen Child’, ‘The Danaan Quicken Tree’, and ‘To an Isle in the Water’ help to clarify the symbolic uses of lakes, and show also how far Yeats was indebted both to Romantic predecessors and to contemporaries such as Katharine Tynan. With ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ Yeats makes decisive use of both images and metrical motifs (which may derive ultimately from Keats) in rendering a specific location as a symbolic locus for his own early anxieties and ambitions.

Authors: McDonald, P

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Journal: Review of English Studies
• Volume: 70
• Issue: 294
• Pages: 312–331
• Publication date: 2019-01-27
• Acceptance date: 2018-10-18
• DOI: 10.1093/res/hgy128
• EISSN: 1471-6968
• ISSN: 0034-6551
• Language: English