W. B. Yeats: Life, works, and literary significance

Yeats' poem

The Isle of Innisfree"

Imagery and imagination come together in William Butler Yeats poem, "The Lake Isle of Innisfree." This poem, written about a real place but enhanced for the reader and the writer for further enjoyment, succeeds because it clearly takes the reader away to this mystical place. Imagery fuels the imagination and Yeats illustrates how a real place can be enhanced with a healthy dose of ideas. In essence, the place is improved because of the poet's ability to craft a new isle.

On the surface, the poem may simply appear to be about an imaginary place. Stuart Hunter disagrees, noting that Yeats created an "ostensibly nostalgic description of a specific geographic location, that through the particular physical details and the symbolic force of details, is transformed into a symbolic landscape" (Stuart 70). In addition, he asserts that the "lake isle is private and enclosed, in this case by the waters of Lough Gill. It is fertile, as the beans and bees clearly indicate. It is numinous, in that is both a physical island and a state of mind created by that island" (Stuart 70). Here we see how the details of the place are real and the poet takes liberty with these facts and creates a mystical version of the locale.

The poet's imagination can be seen with the poet's use of powerful imagery. For example, the poet shows us a cabin "clay and wattles" (Yeats 2), a "hive for a honey bee" (3), a portrait of the night that is "all a glimmer" (7), and pavements that are "grey" (11). In addition, we have no problem imagining the environment the poet experiences when he writes about the water in the "deep heart's core" (12). These images take us right where the poet wants us to be. The poet's imagination helps feed the images for the isle. He does not mean to create an entirely new place - he simply wishes to enhance the one that is already there.

While imagination is important to the poem, it is not all of it. Stuart claims that the poem is often "dismissed as a youthful, nostalgic, derivatively romantic lyric" (Stuart 71). In this way, we can see how the poem is more than just a wishful place. The "retreat to the island of Innisfree is a journey in search of poetic wisdom and spiritual peace, a journey prompted by supernatural yearnings, a journey in quest of identity within a tradition" (71). Stuart claims that the wisdom and peace that the author seeks can only be "realized through a poetic and spiritual grasp of the purity and even identity that exists between the legendary past of the Celtic world and the present" (72). The place is real and it is imagined. Clearly, Yeats intended for us to see both worlds through his lens.