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19 pages 38 minutes read

William Butler Yeats

Among School Children

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1928

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Background

Literary Context

This poem was written three years after Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, which recognized his ability to shift between forms and his mastery of the art. Although most renowned for his poems about myth, magic, and the natural world, the later years of his life in politics influenced his work as well. Many of his poems written around this time were more modern in nature, focusing on politics and the events happening in the world around him. These political years marked a distinctive period in Yeats’s canon.

While the form of “Among School Children” still follows a traditional approach in regard to rhyme and meter, it has a fluidity that may have come from his friendship with modernist poets of the time, such as Ezra Pound, who was an earlier champion of free verse poetry. Although much of this poem is directed inward at the poet’s own imaginings and philosophy, there are sections where the reader can discern a more concrete conversational quality that would go on to distinguish modern free verse. This is most clear in the first stanza, which is the most realistic and accessible of the entire poem, and also in the end of the fourth stanza: “enough of that, / Better to smile on all that smile, and show / There is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow” (Lines 30-32).

Authorial Context

This poem may be one of Yeats’ most personal, as he places himself directly into the story. Yeats served as senator of the Irish Free State from 1923 to 1929 and was an influential political speaker, as well as being involved in education. This poem is believed to have been written in 1926 after a visit to the girls’ convent school of St Otteran’s in Waterford. Here Yeats recounts the children’s awe in seeing a smiling “old scarecrow” (Line 32). He asks questions of the nuns about the quality of education and curriculum, as he would have done in his tours through the schools of his country. This school is one that followed the modern Montessori principles of allowing freedom of expression so that children could learn through self-discovery, an approach which Yeats supported wholeheartedly.

There are also repeated references to a beautiful woman he knew in his youth, believed by critics to be Maud Gonne, who Yeats loved throughout his life and proposed to several times. Looking back on their time from his vantage of old age allows him to examine her in all her facets, from the child she once was to the old woman she has become.

Finally, his use of mythology and theology as a backbone for his musings is characteristic of the author’s work. As a lifelong scholar of metaphysical and esoteric practices, Yeats often used symbols from myth and legend to support and communicate his ideas. The idea that he equates his love Maud with the mythic Helen of Troy shows something about the constant filter through which he saw the world around him.

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