“Leda and the Swan” is a fourteen-line sonnet by Irish poet William Butler Yeats. It was originally published in 1924 in The Dial. The poem adapts a Greek myth in which the god Zeus takes the form of a swan in order to rape the Spartan queen Leda. An erotic Petrarchan sonnet, the poem begins as a description of a surprising sexual union but quickly expands in scope to explore issues of free will and historical rebirth.
The Irish poet and dramatist William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) was perhaps the greatest poet of the 20th century. He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1923 and was the leader of the Irish Literary ...
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William Butler Yeats is widely acknowledged as the greatest poet of the twentieth century. He belonged to the Protestant, Anglo-Irish minority that had controlled the economic, political, social, and ...
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Although the reputation of William Butler Yeats rests primarily on his poetry, the drama remained one of the central concerns throughout his long career. As he explained in 1917, "I need a theatre; ...
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William Butler Yeats , probably the twentieth century's greatest poet in English and certainly one of its most complex men, was born in the Dublin suburb of Sandymount on 13 June 1865. He was the elde...
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William Butler Yeats was born into an Irish-Protestant family on 13 June 1865, in Dublin, the oldest of the four children of the artist John Butler Yeats and Susan Pollexfen Yeats. While he was a youn...
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William Butler Yeats , who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923, is widely regarded as the best poet to write in English during the twentieth century. Yet from 1887 to 1905, the first third of h...
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Biography EssayWilliam Butler Yeats, probably the twentieth century's greatest poet in English and certainly one of its most complex men, was born in the Dublin suburb of Sandymount on 13 June 1865. H...
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Poetry is a very artistic and creative way for poets to freely express themselves, whether it be love, hate, sadness, joy, and even to express themselves sexually. William Butler Yeats uses Greek myt...
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In Leda and the Swan, Yeats is describing a rape. The poem is written in the second person which suggests that it is being told by a bystander. The first stanza is describing foreplay. In the first...
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William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats
