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1 results

  • Chapter 2 - Escaping Impressionism

  • Rob Harris, Magdalen College, Oxford
  • Book:
    After Impressionism
    Published online:
    22 December 2025
    Print publication:
    18 December 2025, pp 87-123
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  • Summary

    Chapter 2 considers the desire to escape impressionism which shaped Yeats’s early writings. Yeats’s formative visual interests are usually discussed in terms of the tastes he inherited from his Pre-Raphaelite father, but in his early verse and criticism he would often also express hatred for, and a desire to escape, French art of the later nineteenth century. In his writings of the 1890s and 1900s, it is the paintings of Édouard Manet which most disturb Yeats, appearing repeatedly to threaten his early theories of symbolism. Time and again, Yeats strove to counter them with the art of Titian, which came to serve as a paradigm for his own evolving poetics. The present chapter considers the antagonism in Yeats’s thought between modern French painting and the art of the Renaissance, as well as the cognate binaries (of hard outline against glimmering colour, unity against disunity) this came to encompass, before exploring their formative influence on the symbolist poetics he was developing at the turn of the century.