A photograph of William Butler Yeats reminded me of my father. On closer examination the eyes, chin, cheeks, mouth, forehead and hair were the same. The shape of the nose was the same, and the lips and the Adam's apple.Wikipedia said that Senator William Butler Yeats, the poet, had heart troubles in early June 1925 that caused him despair and deep depression. June 9th 1925 was was when my grandmother was murdered near Dublin...
Authorities in the new Irish Free State harassed and murdered Honor Bright before maligning her as a prostitute and acquitting her assassin. The newly founded Garda Siochana spread deceitful rumours and coerced witnesses to conceal Honor's true identity and the real reason for her death. False evidence, perjury and the silencing of potential witnesses led to huge public demonstrations, but newspapers were coerced into printing only authorised stories or else face the consequences from the Garda or Ministry of Justice. Find out why political support moved away from the Free State towards an independent Republic from 1926, and why so many were killed or fled Ireland. And find out what part William Butler and his wife George Yeats played in the process.
William Butler Yeats had an extra-marital lover, Lily O'Neill or Honor Bright, from 1918 to 1925. Garda Superintendent Leopold Dillon murdered her on orders from Kevin O'Higgins, Minister of Justice of the Irish Free State. George, Senator Yeats's wife, reported falsely that Lily was a Republican spy. O'Higgins wanted to restore credence in the Free State, which would otherwise have been reclaimed by the British due to maladministration. Afterwards a bogus trial was concocted outside the court circuit by Chief Superintendent David Neligan, at which Lily was reinvented as a prostitute to conceal Yeats's affair and son, and hide the involvement of Free State officials. On the strength of false evidence the jury unanimously acquitted the assassin after three minutes deliberation.
Selections from William Butler Yeats' poetry revealing an autobiographical account of his sudden heart problem and severe depression. Both my father and I loved poetry; we quoted it to each other all the time.He had racks of it on his bookshelves and delighted in showing me the beauty and honesty of the mere arrangement of words. When I began to systematically read the later poetry of William Butler Yeats I was looking for the story of his extra-marital lover, a young Catholic woman who gave birth to his first beloved son. But she was murdered and he had to abandon his son. I found everything I was looking for right here in the poetry.
This number of Yeats Annual collects the essays resulting from the University College Cork/ESB International Annual W. B. Yeats Lectures Series (2003-2008) by Roy Foster, Warwick Gould, John Kelly, Paul Muldoon, Bernard O’Donoghue and Helen Vendler. Those that were available in pamphlet form are now collectors’ items, but here is the complete series. These revised essays cover such themes as Yeats and the Refrain, Yeats as a Love Poet, Yeats, Ireland and Europe, the puzzles he created and solved with his art of poetic sequences, and his long and crucial interaction with the emerging T. S. Eliot. The series was inaugurated by a study of Yeats and his Books, which marked the gift to the Boole Library, Cork, of Dr Eamonn Cantwell’s collection of rare editions of books by Yeats (here catalogued by Crónán Ó Doibhlin). Many of the volume’s fifty-six plates offer images of artists’ designs and resulting first editions. This bibliographical theme is continued with Colin Smythe’s census of surviving copies of Yeats’s earliest separate publication, Mosada (1886) and a resultant piece by Warwick Gould on that dramatic poem’s source in the legend of The Phantom Ship. John Kelly reveals Yeats’s ghost-writing for Sarah Allgood; Geert Lernout discovers the source for Yeats’s ‘Tulka’, Günther Schmigalle unearths his surprising connexions with American communist colonists in Virginia, while Deirdre Toomey edits some new letters to the French anarchist, Auguste Hamon—all providing new annotation for standard editions. The volume is rounded with review essays by Colin McDowell (on A Vision, and Berkeley, Hone and Yeats), shorter reviews of current studies by Michael Edwards, Jad Adams and Deirdre Toomey, and obituaries of Jon Stallworthy (Nicolas Barker) and Katharine Worth (Richard Cave).
The inevitability of death—that of others and our own—is surely among our greatest anxieties. Mortality’s Muse: The Fine Art of Dying explores how art, mainly literary art, addresses that troubling reality. While religion and philosophy offer important consolations for life’s end, art responds in ways that are perhaps more complete and certainly more deeply human. Among subjects treated: the ars moriendi or “art of dying” tradition; the contrast between past and more recent cultural values; the religious consolation’s value but shortcoming for some people; the role of art in offering a secular consolation; dying as a performing art; the philosophic ideal of good death; the lively appeal of carpe diem or living for the present moment; the elegiac sense of life; and the two opposite parts Mortality’s Muse has played in dealing with war, the most senseless and unnecessary cause of death. The idea of an aesthetic sense of life forms the basis of these discussions. Human beings are makers in the largest sense of the word, and art represents everything they make—civilization itself with all its greatness and failings. Our civilization may ultimately be nothing but an evanescent blip in the cosmos. Even so, the creation of beauty, meaning, and purpose from disorder and suffering defines us as human beings. In the words of Robinson Jeffers, even if monuments eventually crumble and all art perish, yet for thousands of years carved stones have stood and “pained thoughts found the honey of peace in old poems.”
This brand new collection, impeccably edited by James Pethica, presents a comprehensive selection of Yeats's major contributions in poetry, drama, prose fiction, autobiography, and criticism.
