'There's nothing but our own red blood / Can make a right Rose Tree'. Discuss the ways in which Yeats presents ideas about Irish identity in Lyrical Poems. In your answer explore the effects of language, imagery and verse form.

It is evident from Yeats’ melancholy reflection on the massacre of Easter 1916, when he writes that “All changed, changed utterly:/ A terrible beauty is born.” (l. 16-7), that something had been irrevocably altered in the aftermath of that event. With that poem there is also a sense of a need to change rhetoric to incorporate political change. Perhaps Yeats had also heard Pound’s modernist cry expounded in his Imagist theory which specified writers should “use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.” , and in e work of Yeats’ middle age there is undoubtedly a conscious desire to strip back archaic pre-Raphaelite and Gaelic discourse, and instead “Wring the neck of rhetoric.”[1] When Yeats writes ‘The Madness of King Goll,’ Yeats is self-conscious of the threat of retreating into a mythical symbolic landscape like the King who “laughed aloud and hurried on/ By rocky shore and rushy fen”, which led to his harp being broken, “the kind wires are torn and still.” The significance of the symbol is political, as the harp was a symbol later appropriated by the Free Ireland State in 1922, and so Yeats’ concern is that delving into this artificial world of symbols as he was attracted to do may lead to a disruption of his desire to be an ‘Irish’ poet. The change in style is addressed in ‘A Coat’, where he characterises his early poetry as “a coat/ with embroideries/ Out of old mythologies,” and argues instead for the “enterprise/ In walking naked.” A plainer diction, tighter syntax and more muscular forms resulted, but the importance of this new style is also political. Yeats’ early work is continually informed by the English literary tradition. Yeats says that his first poem was “much under the influence of Shelley” and featured a character “who expressed himself with Queen Mab-like heterodoxy,” therefore showing the influence of English influence even in subversive texts. His first significant poem was “The Isle of Statues”, a fantasy work that took Edmund Spenser for its poetic model. Yeats still calls himself “the last of the Romantics,” but his difficulty reconciling Shelley's idealism with life in modern Ireland indicated a need to evolve. The corresponding change pre-figures the Irish Revolution, which threw off the yoke of English ideology and intellectual dominance. [1] The quote “Wring the neck of rhetoric” is from the 1884 poem by Verlaine called ‘Art poétique’ which is found in Symonds’ influential 1899 anthology ‘The Symbolist Movement in Literature’ from which Yeats has translated in the Oxford Book of Modern Verse (OBMV, xii)