Easter, 1916  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  (Redirected from Easter 1916) Jump to: navigation, search 1920
photograph of William Butler Yeats    Even though a committed
nationalist, Yeats usually rejected violence as a means to
secure Irish independence, and as a result had strained
relations with some of the figures who eventually led the
uprising.[1] The deaths of these revolutionary figures at the
hands of the British, however, were as much a shock to Yeats as
they were to ordinary Irish people at the time, who did not
expect the events to take a worse turn so soon. Yeats was
working through his feelings about the revolutionary movement in
this poem, and the insistent refrain that "a terrible beauty is
born" turned out to be prescient, as the execution of the
leaders of the Easter Rising by the British had the opposite
effect to that intended. The brutal killings led to a
reinvigoration of the Irish Republican movement rather than its
dissipation. The initial social and ideological distance betwe