“Speech delighted with its own music”: Birds as Symbols of the Creative Process in the Poetry of W.B. Yeats and Edward Thomas

Abstract

The article focuses on the symbolic meanings of birds in selected verse of two distinguished 20th century English language poets—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) and Edward Thomas (1878–1917). There have been hardly any critical attempts to compare their creative output, despite Thomas’s reviews of Yeats’s works which prove a strong impact of Yeats’s style and sensibility on Thomas’s mind. Here, a comparative analysis is offered of bird symbolism in “The Wild Swans at Coole” (1917) by W.B. Yeats and “The Unknown Bird” (1915) by Edward Thomas, where both poets use birds as symbols of the creative process. In their reliance on symbols, they draw heavily on Romantic dialectic to resolve the inner conflict in consciousness and bridge the gap between the poetic self and the natural world. Also, the article is intended to show the impact of Romantic sensibility on the poets’ original styles, which confronts tradition with modernity.