“An old man’s eagle mind”: A Gerontological Perspective to the Problem of Aging in the select works of W.B. Yeats’s later years

Age, as gerontologists look upon it, is a social discourse which is constituted by a system of conventions, expectations and constraints imposed by society on the aged subject and in the case of an aged writer it is his/her own internalized expectations that matter too. An aged person is supposed to be passive, miserable, decrepit, introspective and powerless, seeking the comfort and protection of a domesticated life. This raises a few questions: what can writers make of old age? How do they regard its limitations, its representative archetypes, and society’s expectations of them? How does their attitude change as they grow old?

In the last phase of his career, Yeats’s poetic genius flourished into an unusual intensity of creative writing, so much so that it may be considered phenomenal when it comes to the topic of creativity in old age. Biographical attention has been given to locate its source and formalist-aesthetic discussions have poured in to analyse the dynamics of Yeats’s increasingly complex structuring of the experience of old age in his works over the years of his remarkable artistic development from a fin-de-siѐcle romantic to a metaphysical-symbolist-realist poet towards the end of his career. Relatively less attention has been given to exploring the psycho-social dimension of the late creativity of this gifted intellectual and hence the need for adding a gerontological perspective to this much-discussed topic so that old age may be seen as a powerful trope in the dynamics of Yeats’s thoughts on death and immortality, enabling us to identify the characteristic imaginative modes of late writing and to ramify the paradigms of gerontological studies as well.

In this context, the images and metaphors of old age and their rich ambivalence in Yeats’s later poems are suggestive of a productive tension between the social conventions and stereotypes of old age and the poet’s intensely personal experience of it as a time of apocalyptic self-renewal. Moreover, in his later years, he seems deeply preoccupied with the dialogue between his private and public self, leading to a self-chosen distancing from all the external demands of the modern world on the one hand and inventing new and less flattering ‘masks’ of antithetical selfhood on the other. Be it the mask of a madman, or aged sexuality, or androgyny, these forms of aged subjectivity are made to infuse new values in representing the aged and to undermine social expectations that are too restrictive in measuring the power and strengths of old age.  

Dr. Sudipta Chakraborty is working as an Assistant Professor of English in Sreegopal Banerjee College (Govt. Sponsored and affiliated to the University of Burdwan), Hooghly, West Bengal. Dr Chakraborty has presented scholarly papers in different national and international level seminars and conferences. He has quite a few number of publications to his credit in renowned national and international journals. His doctoral dissertation ─ “Space and Cultural Geography: A Study in V.S. Naipaul’s Representation of India in his Travel Narratives” ─ has been widely acclaimed both in India and abroad. He may be contacted at schakra2006@gmail.com.