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![]() According to the story, Helen was hatched from an egg. ![]() After the rape, Leda gets pregnant and gives birth to Helen of Troy. This is definitely not the case in Yeats's graphic version. In many versions of the story, Zeus merely seduces Leda. Yeats's poem was inspired by a Greek myth in which Zeus rapes Leda, the daughter of a king named Thestius. If you're into bold statements of opinion, at least one major critic has called "Leda and the Swan" the greatest poem of the 20th century ( source). He was also serving in the Irish Senate at the time. Yeats saved his best for last he was in his 60s when he wrote this masterpiece. The Tower was published five years after Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923. The Tower includes other great poems like "Among Schoolchildren" and " Sailing to Byzantium." "Leda and the Swan" was published in Yeats's 1928 collection The Tower – one of the most celebrated and important literary works of the 20th century. ![]() Stories about sex with animals were fairly common in classical societies like Ancient Greece, and the myth of Leda and the swan was once well known. Yeats presents this tale in a relatively graphic way, so modern readers may find the language disturbing. The "twist" of the story is that Zeus is disguised as a swan. ![]() William Butler Yeats's "Leda and the Swan" retells the story from Greek mythology of the rape of a girl named Leda by Zeus, the most powerful of the Greek gods. ![]()
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