Download or read book Gender and History in Yeats's Love Poetry written by Elizabeth Cullingford and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This first full-length feminist treatment of Yeats shows how his experience of changes in the balance of power between men and women led him to expand the formal possibilities of love poetry. As a white, male, middle-class, Protestant citizen of the British Empire, with an acknowledged debt to canonical English writers, Yeats belonged to the dominant tradition. As a colonized Irishman, however, he was acutely conscious of repression and exclusion. This detailed examination of Yeats's work re-situates a private genre in a public context, relating the formal conventions of love poetry to the histories of the emancipation of women and the decolonization of Ireland. Yeats's complex position in history and culture, his long obsession with a "New Woman," his unstable gender identity, and his constant remaking of traditional lyric forms, combine to differentiate his love poetry from that of misogynist practitioners of the genre.