Tower of Memories:W.B. Yeats and Thoor Ballylee

Various analogies can be drawn between architecture and literature. Thus,it is only natural if we assume that the spirit of a given age would be reflectedin the styles of both forms of art. John Ruskin said, `All architecture proposes aneffect on the human mind, not merely a service to the human frame' (The SevenLamps of Architecture).The ruin of representation was mainly discussed in the context of literatureand paintings of the Romantic period. One of the reasons for this association wasWilliam Wordsworth's famous poem `Tintern Abbey', in which he expressed thefeeling of loss and beauty evoked by ruins. Wordsworth defined poetry as`emotion recollected in tranquility' (Lyrical Ballads). As Ruskin aptly pointed out,`We may live without [architecture], and worship without her, but we cannot rememberwithout her.' Architecture is closely related to memory, which is passeddown from generation to generation. In 1917, William Butler Yeats (1865_1939)purchased the 16th - century Norman tower Thoor Ballylee, located near CoolePark. For twelve years he made Thoor Ballylee his summer home: it was `sofull of history and romance' of Gaelic Ireland that it served as an inspiration forhis poems and stories.This paper seeks to investigate the symbolic significance of the ruinedtower of Thoor Ballylee in his poems. While Yeats' early work was steeped inthe influence of Pre-Raphaelite's Brotherhood, Thoor Ballylee, the inspirationfor his later work, was a monument rooted in the Celtic past, Anglo-Irish ascendancy,and Yeats' sense of identity and belonging. After the 1920s, in particular,Yeats developed an interest in a abstract cubist sculpture, such as the work ofBrancusi. He was also increasingly attracted to the Vorticist movement underthe influence of Ezra Pound. While Romanticism emphasized sentimentality andemotion, modernism like British Vorticism extolled the energy of machines andmachine-made products. Jacob Epstein's Rock-Drill is an apposite example.The point at issue is how Yeats could reconcile the differences between theimage of the ruined tower and the tower of modernism in his mind. The formeris a monument to the Celtic past, while the latter is represented by a windingstair which suggests the image of a vortex or `gyre'.Few studies have discussed Yeats' Tower from this point of view. LiamMirror's Thoor Ballylee dealt with the history, background, and restoration processof the tower. Anthony Bradley examined Yeats' later poems in connectionwith a modernist group. Besides, Ellen Eve Frank dealt with the relationship betweenarchitecture and literature, and ornament and text in LiteraryArchitecture.This paper comprises the following four parts : 'Modernism and Yeats', `TheMetaphor of the Tower', `Recollection and an Identity', and `Tower ofModernism'. Yeats can be regarded not only as a Romantic poet, but also, tosome extent, as a modernist, like Pound. It could be said that the Irish colonialexperience led him to adopt a different form of Modernism as compared to theEnglish poets.1KJ00009368739論文Articledepartmental bulletin pape