A Master’s Monument: Shakespeare’s Sonnets in the Poetry of W. B. Yeats

Abstract

This article explores the reception of Shakespeare’s Sonnets by W.B. Yeats. In her recent study Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form (2007), Helen Vendler has stressed the importance of taking the formal structures of W. B. Yeats’ poetry seriously. If her analyses occasionally seem overwrought in all their technical detail, she nevertheless forcefully argues that “technique was never, for Yeats, without conceptual meaning” (153). But the actual conceptual meanings she brings forth are often less than convincing – particularly so in the case of Yeats’ appropriation of the Shakespearean sonnet.