“Discuss the Ways in Which Yeats Presents His Ideas About Writing and the Audience for His Poetry in ‘the Fisherman’ ”

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“Discuss the ways in which Yeats presents his ideas about writing and the audience for his poetry in ‘The Fisherman’ ” The Fisherman appears to epitomise Yeats’s ideal audience as his simple purity is shown through his relationship with nature and the description of his unpretentious clothes in the quote ‘to a grey place on hill in grey Connemara clothes’. The repetition and colour imagery of ‘grey’ highlights how Yeats’s ideal audience does not have superficial qualities as grey is not a superficial colour. For Yeats, it is the fisherman’s inner qualities of truth and art that matter and have meaning rather than the superficial values of his audience. The natural imagery of the fisherman on a ‘hill’ highlights his innocence and purity as he is at one with nature and learns from life experiences. This is what Yeats wanted his idealised audience to be like but in reality, Yeats felt that his audience was corrupted, as they did not understand his art that he spent so long working on. In 1907, Yeats dashed hopes for his ideal audience became apparent when the public rioted against his play ‘The Playboy of the Western World’, leading Yeats to feel disillusioned with his audience and as if Ireland did not understand the truth in his writing and art. Similarly, in Yeats’s poem ‘September 1913’, the Dublin bourgeoisie are described to be similar to Yeats’s audience. This is shown in the repeated refrain “Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone, It’s with O’Leary in the grave’ as the Dublin bourgeoisie do not understand the art of the patriots similar to how Yeats’s audience do not understand his art. The monosyllables ‘dead and gone’ emphasises how Yeats felt he Dublin bourgeoisie had betrayed the memories of the great men of the past as in 1913, William Martin Murphy opposed plans to keep Hugh Lanes valuable paintings in Dublin. Instead, the paintings were kept in

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