The Black Swan: Yeats and the Science of the Unknown

This essay views science as a creative mask for the poetry and philosophy of W.B. Yeats. It explores the changing worldview which occurred at the beginning of the twentieth century with the discovery of wave-particle duality by Max Planck in 1900. It considers the new concepts of reality which arose at this time in relation to modernism and Yeats's response to the paradigmatic change of era he was a part of. Accordingly, the poet's understanding of universal history in A Vision (1925, 1937) is used alongside close readings of his poetry to evince an argument which unites that poetry with philosophy, scientific theory, and modernism as aspects of one universe of knowledge which refracts different aspects of itself through the prism of time.