"Most of the newly discovered poems date from the mid-1880s and reveal how Yeats experimented with style, stance, and subject during the crucial years at the beginning of his poetic career. Nine others written in the 1890s display a more polished technique, and many of these address the themes of Yeats's love for Maud Gonne and his occult interests. The editor's introduction to this volume will replace the familiar image of the young Yeats as dreamy and apolitical with a more accurate perception of him as a poet highly involved in the political and cultural issues of his day."--BOOK JACKET.
The two great Yeats Family Sales of 2017 and the legacy of the Yeats family’s 80-year tradition of generosity to Ireland’s great cultural institutions provide the kaleidoscope through which these advanced research essays find their theme. Hannah Sullivan’s brilliant history of Yeats’s versecraft challenges Poundian definitions of Modernism; Denis Donoghue offers unique family memories of 1916 whilst tracing the political significance of the Easter Rising; Anita Feldman addresses Yeats’s responses to the Rising’s appropriation of his symbols and myths, the daring artistry of his ritual drama developed from Noh, his poetry of personal utterance, and his vision of art as a body reborn rather than a treasure preserved amid the testing of the illusions that hold civilizations together in ensuing wars. Warwick Gould looks at Yeats as founding Senator in the new Free State, and his valiant struggle against the literary censorship law of 1929 (with its present-day legacy of Irish anti-blasphemy law still presenting a constitutional challenge). Drawing on Gregory Estate documents, James Pethica looks at the evictions which preceded Yeats’s purchase of Thoor Ballylee in Galway; Lauren Arrington looks back at Yeats, Ezra Pound, and the Ghosts of The Winding Stair (1929) in Rapallo. Having co-edited both versions of A Vision, Catherine Paul offers some profound reflections on ‘Yeats and Belief’. Grevel Lindop provides a pioneering view of Yeats’s impact on English mystical verse and on Charles Williams who, while at Oxford University Press, helped publish the Oxford Book of Modern Verse. Stanley van der Ziel looks at the presence of Shakespeare in Yeats’s Purgatory. William H. O’Donnell examines the vexed textual legacy of his late work, On the Boiler while Gould considers the challenge Yeats’s intentionalism posed for once-fashionable post-structuralist editorial theory. John Kelly recovers a startling autobiographical short story by Maud Gonne. While nine works of current biographical, textual and literary scholarship are reviewed, Maud Gonne is the focus of debate for two reviewers, as are Eva Gore-Booth, Constance and Casimir Markievicz, Rudyard Kipling, David Jones, T. S. Eliot and his presence on the radio.
"The Wanderings of Oisin" is a narrative poem by W. B. Yeats that delves into themes of aging, nostalgia, and the passage of time. Drawing from Irish mythology and legend, the poem follows the ancient hero Oisin, who returns to Ireland after spending three centuries in the mythical land of Tír na nÓg with the fairy princess Niamh. As Oisin recounts his adventures and reflects on the changes that have occurred in his absence, he grapples with a sense of displacement and loss in a world vastly different from the one he knew. Through vivid descriptions and lyrical language, Yeats evokes a sense of longing for a glorious past while also exploring the inevitable dissonance between memory and reality. The poem captures the tension between the desire for eternal youth and the reality of mortality, as Oisin comes to terms with the transient nature of life and the inevitability of change. "The Wanderings of Oisin" stands as a poignant meditation on the passage of time, the complexities of memory, and the enduring power of myth and storytelling.
An important part of the national imaginary, Yeat's work has helped to invent the nation of Ireland, while critiquing the modern state that emerged from it's revolutionary period. This study offers a chronological account of Yeat's volumes of poetry, contextualizing and analyzing them in light of Irish cultural and political history.
In this multi-volume edition, the poetry of W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) is presented in full, with newly-established texts and detailed, wide-ranging commentary. Yeats began to write verse in the nineteenth century, and over time his own arrangements of poems repeatedly revised and rearranged both texts and canon. This edition of Yeats’s poetry presents all his verse, both published and unpublished, including a generous selection of textual variants from the many manuscript and printed sources. The edition also supplies the most extensive commentary on Yeats’s poetry to date, explaining specific references, and setting poems in their contexts; it also gives an account of the vast range of both literary and historical influences at work on the verse. The poems are presented in order of composition, and major revisions or rewritings of poems result in separate inclusions (in chronological sequence) for these writings as they were subsequently reconceived by the poet. This first volume collects Yeats’s poetry of the 1880s, from his ambitious and extensive juvenilia (including hitherto little-noticed dramatic poems) to his earliest published pieces, leading to his first substantial book of verse. The pastoral romance of classically-inflected early work like ‘The Island of Statues’ is succeeded in these years by the Irish mythic material that finds its largest canvas in the mini-epic ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’. In Yeats’s work through the 1880s, an adolescent poet’s youthful absorption in Romantic poetry is replaced by a commitment to esoteric religious speculation and Irish political nationalism. This edition allows readers to see Yeats’s emergence as a poet step by step in compelling detail in relation to his literary influences – including, significantly, the Anglo-Irish poetry of the nineteenth century. The commentary provides an extensive view of Yeats’s developing personal, cultural, and historical worlds as the poems gain in maturity and depth. From the first attempts at verse of a teenage boy to the fully accomplished writings of an original poet standing on the verge of popular success with poems such as ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’, Yeats’s poetry is displayed here in unprecedented fullness and detail.
An edited collection on poetic creation in the Victorian period that studies nine major Victorian poets: Wordsworth, Tennyson, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Clough, Christina Rossetti, Hopkins, Swinburne, and Yeats.
This set reissues 6 books, originally published between 1951 and 1990, on William Butler Yeats, a foremost figure of twentieth-century literature and one of the driving forces behind the Irish Literary Revival. The volumes examine Yeats’s work, his poetic development, and his social and private life, and will be of interest to students of literature.
The last century was characterised by an extraordinary flowering of the art of poetry in Britain. These specially commissioned essays by some of the most highly regarded poetry critics offer a stimulating and reliable overview of English poetry of the twentieth century. The opening section on contexts will both orientate readers relatively new to the field and provide provocative syntheses for those already familiar with it. Following the terms introduced by this section, individual chapters cover many ways of looking at the 'modern', the 'modernist' and the 'postmodern'. The core of the volume is made up of extensive discussions of individual poets, from W. B. Yeats and W. H. Auden to contemporary poets such as Simon Armitage and Carol Ann Duffy. In its coverage of the development, themes and contexts of modern poetry, this Companion is the most useful guide available for students, lecturers and readers.
The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry offers an authorative collection of original essays and is an essential resource for those interested in Victorian poetry and poetics.
