The Contribution of Romanticism to Modernism as seen in Keats, Ibsen and Yeats

ABSTRACT: This thesis primarily focuses on the Romantic poet John Keats’s poem Ode on a Grecian Urn, the Modernist poet and playwright Henrik Johan Ibsen’s play When we Dead Awaken and the Romantic Modernist poet and critic William Butler Yeats’s poem Sailing to Byzantium in order to demonstrate Romanticism’s contribution to the so called modernist movement in terms of idealism. The thesis begins with a demonstration of Keats as a representative of Romanticism and the explanation of the crucial Romantic traits. Ode on a Grecian Urn is analyzed through the Romantic features such as imagination, emotion, nature and beauty. Then it continues with a revelation of Ibsen as a Modernist playwright who has romantic roots and When we Dead Awaken as a romantic and modernist play. Afterwards, it maintains Yeats as a Romantic Modernist and Sailing to Byzantium as an example to Yeats’s transition from Romanticism to Modernism. Finally, it concludes by declaring the fact that although all three works were written in different years, they have a number of similarities that constitute their basic principles. This thesis aims to depict that the artists are influenced by the social, political, cultural and economic developments that occur in their time and shape their artistic visions according to their thoughts about the crisis. They reflect their reaction to their current social problems by protesting the established order and mostly create substitutes for reality which are idealized human beings in order to avoid the effect of time and mortal limitations. In addition to this, these artists try to reflect an ideal world, which they cannot achieve to have in the material realm. Therefore, they depict this ideal world in a transcendental level. While idealizing human beings the artists demonstrate a human paradox which indicates the thirst to live forever. At the end it displays a picture that the human beings are transient however, immortality can be achieved through creating a work of art and being remembered forever. Keywords: Romanticism, Modernism, John Keats, Henrik Johan Ibsen, William Butler Yeats, Idealism, Immortality. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………