The forty-two chapters in this book consider Yeats's early toil, his practical and esoteric concerns as his career developed, his friends and enemies, and how he was and is understood. This Handbook brings together critics and writers who have considered what Yeats wrote and how he wrote, moving between texts and their contexts in ways that will lead the reader through Yeats's multiple selves as poet, playwright, public figure, and mystic. It assembles a variety of views and adds to a sense of dialogue, the antinomian or deliberately-divided way of thinking that Yeats relished and encouraged. This volume puts that sense of a living dialogue in tune both with the history of criticism on Yeats and also with contemporary critical and ethical debates, not shirking the complexities of Yeats's more uncomfortable political positions or personal life. It provides one basis from which future Yeats scholarship can continue to participate in the fascination of all the contributors here in the satisfying difficulty of this great writer.
Walter Pater and Persons investigates the vital concept of the Person in the work of Walter Pater, a major influence on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature. Stephen Cheeke explores the intersections of the person, persona, and personality in Pater's work; re-examines arguments about his famously personal prose style; traces Pater's ambivalent fascination with impersonality and asceticism; considers the poetics of personification in his writings about Greek myth and religion, in the divine logos of early Christianity, and in the theory of Platonic Universals; and explores his fascination with metempsychosis (the many persons through whom the individual soul transmigrates). Cheeke also explores the networks in which Pater was interpreted and misinterpreted by different persons and personalities, such as Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons, and W.B Yeats. Their (mis)readings of Pater, and rebellions against his work from Decadent, antinomian, and 'mystical' perspectives, reveal the ways in which Pater's writing had always been in a critical dialogue with its own thinking, as well as a prescient one in relation to his reception. The philosophical question of 'what is a person?'--a crucial one for the nineteenth century, and with an increasing urgency in our own times--is illuminated throughout this work.
Arguing for a reconsideration of William Butler Yeats’s work in the light of contemporary studies of world literature, Barry Sheils shows how reading Yeats enables a fuller understanding of the relationship between the extensive map of world literary production and the intensities of poetic practice. Yeats’s appropriation of Japanese Noh theatre, his promotion of translations of Rabindranath Tagore and Shri Purohit Swãmi, and his repeated ventures into American culture signalled his commitment to moving beyond Europe for his literary reference points. Sheils suggests that a reexamination of the transnational character of Yeats's work provides an opportunity to reflect critically on the cosmopolitan assumptions of world literature, as well as on the politics of modernist translation. Through a series of close and contextual readings, the book demonstrates how continuing global debates around the crises of economic liberalism and democracy, fanaticism, asymmetric violence, and bioethics were reflected in the poet's formal and linguistic concerns. Challenging orthodox readings of Yeats as a late-romantic nationalist, W.B. Yeats and World Literature: The Subject of Poetry makes a compelling case for reading Yeats’s work in the context of its global modernity.
Critical attention to the Victorian supernatural has flourished over the last twenty-five years. Whether it is spiritualism or Theosophy, mesmerism or the occult, the dozens of book-length studies and hundreds of articles that have appeared recently reflect the avid scholarly discussion of Victorian mystical practices. Designed both for those new to the field and for experts, this volume is organized into sections covering the relationship between Victorian spiritualism and science, the occult and politics, and the culture of mystical practices. The Ashgate Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism and the Occult brings together some of the most prominent scholars working in the field to introduce current approaches to the study of nineteenth-century mysticism and to define new areas for research.
Modernist Writers and the Marketplace is a new research-level collection devoted to an exciting area in the history of the book. Focusing on Henry James, W.B. Yeats, Joseph Conrad, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis and the culture of the little magazine of the period, eleven contributors from six countries demonstrate new developments in the sociology of texts, the practice of literary biography, and textual criticism.
Modernism, as a powerful movement, saw the literary and artistic traditions, as well as pure science, starting to evolve radically, creating a crisis, even chaos, in culture and society. Within this chaos, myth offered an ordered picture of that world employing symbolic and poetic images. Both W.B. Yeats and Angelos Sikelianos embraced myth and symbols because they liberate imagination and raise human consciousness, bringing together humans and the cosmos. Being opposed to the rigidity of scientific materialism that inhibits spiritual development, the two poets were waiting for a new age and a new religion, expecting that they, themselves, would inspire their community and usher in the change. In their longing for a new age, archaeology was a magnetic field for Yeats and Sikelianos, as it was for many writers and thinkers. After Sir Arthur Evans’s discovery of the Minoan Civilization where women appeared so peacefully prominent, the dream of re-creating a gynocentric mythology was no longer a fantasy. In Yeats’s and Sikelianos’s gynocentric mythology, the feminine figure appears in various forms and, like in a drama, it plays different roles. Significantly, a gynocentric mythology permeates the work of the two poets and this mythology is of pivotal importance in their poetry, their poetics and even in their life as the intensity of their creative desire brought to them female personalities to inspire and guide them. Indeed, in Yeats’s and Sikelianos’s gynocentric mythology, the image of the feminine holds a place within a historical context taking the reader into a larger social, political and religious space.
W. B. Yeats and Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) regarded style as a tool for metaphysical inquiry and, consequently, they adopted distinct poetic styles to convey different attitudes towards experience. Silva-McNeill's study examines how the poets' stylistic diversification was a means of rehearsing different existential and aesthetic stances. It identifies parallels between their styles from a comparative case studies approach. Their stylistic masks allowed them to maintain the subjectivity and authenticity associated with the lyrical genre, while simultaneously attaining greater objectivity and conveying multiple perspectives. The poets continuously transformed the fond and form of their verse, creating a protean lyrical voice that expressed their multilateral poetic temperament and reflected the depersonalisation and formal experimentalism of the modern lyric.
This book explores Yeats's later poetry through the metaphor of the poetic tower, where different kinds of 'building' - architectural, textual, political and symbolic - were closely interrelated. It chronologically examines Yeats's tower poems, composed during a period of dramatic personal and national transformation, from 1915 to 1932. Within a year after the Easter Rising in Dublin, Yeats acquired a half-ruined Norman tower in County Galway, Ireland, which had enthralled him for the past two decades, and textually and architecturally constructed it into a focus of his life and work. Interweaving the account of the renovation of the actual building and the textual construction in the socio-historical contexts, the book reveals the evolution of Yeats's multiplex tower as an organizing principle of his later poetry. Using the archive of correspondence and manuscript materials of relevant poems, including those which have thus far escaped close attention, the book offers close textual-genetic analyses and a diachronic view of Yeats's tower poetry, which, with its foundations laid decades earlier, he built in the collections from The Wild Swans at Coole (1919) to The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933). Highlighting the delicate exchange between poetry and biography as well as between the textual architecture and the actual one, identifying a turning point in the making of each tower-oriented poem and proposing some draft-dating revisions, this first book-length systematic study on the process of Yeats's creation of the tower casts an unfamiliar light on a familiar yet underexplored landmark in modern poetry and makes his step-by-step construction work come alive. Tomoko Iwatsubo is Professor at Hosei University, Tokyo, Japan. She has published a number of articles on W. B. Yeats.