TITLE:  Liminality and Identification: A Rhetorical Analysis of Yeats’ “Easter, 1916”

AUTHOR: Rick Wysocki

CATEGORY: Mind

AUTHOR COMMENTARY:

This essay is a rhetorical analysis of Yeats’ much celebrated poem “Easter, 1916.” I’ve always been struck by the ambiguity present in its depiction of the actual Irish revolutionaries it poeticizes and narrativizes, and this reading seeks to demystify this ambiguity through an interdisciplinary perspective of literary criticism, rhetorical examination, and historical contextualization. The essay addresses the topic of “Mind” in a number of ways—through an examination of liminality as both an influence on and an effect of the poetic voice, through its commentary on the desire for and motivation toward identification, and through its conceptualization of these factors within Yeats’ writing (the product of “Mind”) itself. On a broader level, this piece addresses the overall theme of “Limit” by explaining these phenomena as a mechanism by which Yeats defines and delimits the world around him poetically, again in an effort toward self-identification.

ENTRY:

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