Elizabeth Barrett-Browning and W.B. Yeats :: Biography Biographies Essays

Elizabeth Barrett- browning and W.B. Yeats Elizabeth Barrett-Browning and W.B. Yeats, examined in concert in the same sitting atomic number 18 as different as the Victorian and Post-Modernist epochs they emerged from, yet they were both independent thinkers of their time. Browning, born in 1806 in the first place Victorianism came into full play, was celebrated as a woman poet but as well as quite conforming to the Victorian movement in some regards. Browning did make use of her familys money to give herself an exceptional education (1858) and she vox populi outside of traditional lines in regards to gender roles for women as in her meter Aurora Leigh. In this poem, the narrator is a woman which is unusual for that era Place your fecund heart in mine, and let us crown for the world (1877). It was unusual in the Victorian era - to consider that women added anything tangible to a marriage relationship. Browning was definitely independent in her idea and in he r personal life - defying her father by eloping with Robert Browning former(a) in life (1859). There are other elements of her poetry that are fairly conformist to the Victorian age. Her poem Sonnets from the Portugese describes a courtship that is discreet and in keeping with Victorian age. This form of a sonnet was taken from Shakespeares style, yet another element of Browning stepping into territory formerly and occupied by men (1859). W.B. Yeats, influenced in large part by his free-thinking father, became just that (2322). Yeats poetry contains elements of the mysticism that he studied, whether the double worded centre of The Second Coming or the telephone extension to Spiritus Mundi in that poem, Yeats defied the religious conformist thinking prevalent at the end of the Victorian era.. In his poem, navigation to Byzantium, Yeats takes on the narrative voice of an old man, sailing away from his mother country to Byzantium, where old men stand in Gods h oly fire (2332). This reference to Byzantium, a city of the Roman empire, would not have been considered holy by traditional religious thinking. Yeats borrows from Greek mythology in Leda and the Swan and puts words to a sexually explicit tale of a swan raping a fille (2337).