Gregory Orr: Keats to Yeats – from Lyric to Dramatic Lyric (January 1992)

Gregory Orr examines the lyric poems of Keats and Yeats to explore the tension in them between lyric longing and external reality. Tracing the development of both poets, Orr suggests that their early poems attempt to reach out of the world, toward a lyric sphere of transcendence; he then shows how each poet was able to develop a more dramatic type of lyric by reaching out to the world, and allowing their poems to encompass a dialectic between “the conditional and the lyric.”