Music for Words: The Role of Accompaniment in Yeats's Late Songs

This thesis examines the late lyrics of W. B. Yeats in an exploration of his evolving understanding of the relationship between music and poetry, drawing on his personal letters, essays, and speeches. The thesis first contextualizes Yeats’s late work, resulting from a lifetime of musicality and catalyzed by an illness that shifted his attention toward old, unrealized goals of uniting music and poetry. It then looks at three publications through which Yeats attempted to combine the distinct, often opposing forces of musical accompaniment and his own intrinsically musical poetics: Words for Music Perhaps (1932), “Three Songs to the Same Tune” (1934), and Broadsides (1937). These works, along with Yeats’s personal correspondence and other concurrent writings, highlight his understanding of music as part of the Irish oral tradition, his view of himself as a modern Irish bard, and the centrality of emotion and communal experience to music. These themes reframe the role of musical accompaniment in Yeats’s work, therefore opening up a way of uniting the two seemingly contrary energies of music and poetry.