Narration, Responsibility, and Awareness in Yeats’s “The Dolls”

Yeats’s “The Dolls” uses multi-faceted symbolism and third-person narration to address the artist’s responsibility for social and political awareness. The poem reads like a fairy tail about living dolls who are insulted by their maker’s decision to have a child. The doll-maker is troubled by this, but his wife is ultimately the one who addresses the […]

“The Song of Wandering Aengus:” Politics and Aesthetics in Literary Adaptation

Yeats’s early work, including “The Song of Wandering Aengus,” is characterized by lyricism, natural imagery, and allusions to Irish mythology. These characteristics allowed Scottish singer Donovan to include the poem on his album H.M.S. Donovan (1971), which is a collection of legends, poems, and folk tales set to music. Though the text remains the same, the time […]

The Universality and Individualism of Abstraction in Modernist Art

Introduction Theodore Adorno once wondered how artists were capable of producing beauty after the atrocities of the Holocaust. Faced with such atrocities, many turn to art for clarity and healing. The rise of Modernism and Abstract Expressionism came out of this need for healing. In an art form that rejected representation and removed itself completely […]