Author: Brenda Maddox
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 9780060985042
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 530
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Book Description
William Butter Yeats, who some critics feel was the greatest English language poet of our century, led a life of many contradictions. He was Ireland's most revered writer and won the Nobel Prize for Literature. But in his private life, Yeats struggled with passionate, if unrequited, relationships with women and was haunted by the spirits of his ancestors. Renowned biographer Brenda Maddox examines the poet's life through the prism of his personal obsession with the supernatural and otherworldly. She considers for the first time the Automatic Script, the trancelike communication with supposed spirits that he and his much younger wife. Georgie, conducted during the early years of their marriage. Writing with edge, wit, and energy, she finds the essential clues to Yeats's life and work in his unusual relationships with women, most particularly Maude and Iseult Gonne, his wife Georgie, and his rarely discussed mother.
Author: Richard J. Finneran
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472111824
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 314
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Book Description
Another volume in the distinguished annual
Author: Nicholas Grene
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191552941
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 261
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Book Description
Nicholas Grene explores Yeats's poetic codes of practice, the key words and habits of speech that shape the reading experience of his poetry. Where previous studies have sought to decode his work, expounding its symbolic meanings by references to Yeats's occult beliefs, philosophical ideas or political ideology, the focus here is on his poetic technique, its typical forms and their implications for the understanding of the poems. Grene is concerned with the distinctive stylistic signatures of the Collected Poems: the use of dates and place names within individual poems; the handling of demonstratives and of grammatical tense and mood; certain nodal Yeatsian words ('dream', 'bitter', 'sweet') and images (birds and beasts); dialogue and monologue as the voices of his dramatic lyrics. The aim throughout is to illustrate the shifting and unstable movement between lived reality and transcendental thought in Yeats, the embodied quality of his poetry between a phenomenal world of sight and an imagined world of vision.
Author: Neil Mann
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 098353392X
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 395
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Book Description
W. B. Yeats's "A Vision": Explications and Contexts' is the first volume of essays devoted to 'A Vision' and the associated system developed by W. B. Yeats and his wife, George. 'A Vision' is all-encompassing in its stated aims and scope, and it invites a wide range of approaches-asdemonstrated in the essays collected here, written by the foremost scholars in the field.The first six essays present explications of broader themes in 'A Vision' itself: the system's general principles; incarnate life and the Faculties; discarnate life and the Principles; how Yeats relates his own work to other philosophical approaches; and his consideration of the historical process.A further three essays include an examination of the elusive 'Thirteenth Cone', a consideration of astrological features in the automatic script, and a view of the poetry within 'A Vision'. The final five essays look at contextual themes, whether of collaboration and influence-between husband, wife,and spirits, or with another poet-or the gender perspective within these interrelations, the historical context of Golden-Dawn occultism or the broader political context of fascism in the 1920s and 1930s. Throughout, the different contributors take a variety of stances with regard to texts and theautomatic script.This is an important contribution to Yeats scholarship in general and a landmark in studies of 'A Vision'.
Author: Paul Legault
Publisher: Coach House Books
ISBN: 1770566414
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 60
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Book Description
W. B. Yeats meets Gregg Araki at a gay bar. The Tower is a "translation" of W. B. Yeats's The Tower—an homage and reinvention of the poet’s greatest work. Whereas Yeats’s book contended with his mortality as an aging spiritualist Irish Senator, this version contends with a new mortality: ours. The poems in this collection crystallize the transition from Legault’s late twenties to his early thirties, situated in North America during a time of political upheaval. It takes each of Yeats’s poems as a starting point and queers them. It translates Yeats’s modernist urge, on the other side of a long century. In her review of The Tower, Virginia Woolf says Yeats has “never written more exactly and more passionately.” One might imagine she’d conclude the same here. You can’t fault these poems for lacking passion. Yeats used to talk to ghosts. His wife would let ghosts talk through her. They would talk to Yeats, and he would write down what they say. Another way you could put it is that Yeats talked to his wife. Ghosts are much closer than you think. They like to live in books. So Legault spent some time talking to Yeats’s ghost. Or, Yeats’s ghost talked to him. This is him talking back. "Through Legault, the opening of Yeats’ words in the title poem shift and turn from absurdity to one of anxieties around ageing" —rob mclennan's Blog "If you've never cared about poetry, you will after reading these modern-day renderings..." —Maria-Claire
Author: Brenda Maddox
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Author: David Holdeman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 113945787X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 127
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Book Description
This introduction to one of the twentieth century's most important writers examines Yeats's poems, plays and stories in relation to biographical, literary, and historical contexts. Yeats wrote with passion and eloquence about personal disappointments, his obsession with Ireland, and the modern era's loss of faith in traditional beliefs about art, religion, empire, social class, gender and sex. His works uniquely reflect the gradual transition from Victorian aestheticism to the modernism of Pound, Eliot and Joyce. This is the first introductory study to consider his work in all genres in light of the latest biographies, new editions of his letters and manuscripts, and recent accounts by feminist and postcolonial critics. While using this introduction, students will have instant access to the world of current Yeats scholarship as well as being provided with the essential facts about his life and literary career and suggestions for further reading.
Author: Brenda Maddox
Publisher: Picador USA
ISBN: 9780330376563
Category : Poets, Irish
Languages : en
Pages : 400
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Book Description
Many know the public Yeats but few have managed to penetrate to the inner man, or to explore the relationship with his much younger wife, George. Here Brenda Maddox brings all her talents to bear on one of the most written about but least understood literary giants of the twentieth century. 'A stylish, less than entirely reverent and often deeply touching account of the strains of living with a scatty, splendid genius . . . An unqualified delight from start to finish' Observer 'What emerges is not simply the best account we have of Yeats's tricky private life, but an extraordinarily illuminating rereading of his poetry. Maddox uses his work with the lightest touch, never falling into unthinking autobiographical interpretation, but always paying due care to its formal properties. The result is a complex, elegant delight' Literary Review
Author: Matthew Gibson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 1942954255
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 368
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Book Description
Yeats, Philosophy, and the Occult\ is a collection of essays examining the thought of the Irish poet W. B. Yeats and particularly his philosophical reading and explorations of older systems of thought, where philosophy, mysticism, and the supernatural blend. It opens with a broad survey of the current state of Yeats scholarship, which also includes an examination of Yeats's poetic practice through a manuscript of the original core of a poem that became a work of philosophical thought and occult lore, The Phases of the Moon. The following essay examines an area where spiritualism, eugenic theory, and criminology cross paths in the writings of Cesare Lombroso, and Yeats's response to his work. The third paper considers Yeats's debts to the East, especially Buddhist and Hindu thought, while the fourth looks at his ideas about the dream-state, the nature of reality, and contact with the dead. The fifth essay explores Yeats's understanding of the concept of the Great Year from classical astronomy and philosophy, and its role in the system of his work\ A Vision, and the sixth paper studies that work's theory of contemporaneous periods affecting each other across history in the light of Oswald Spengler's\ The Decline of the West. The seventh essay evaluates Yeats's reading of Berkeley and his critics' appreciation (or lack of it) of how he responds to Berkeley's idealism. The book as a whole explores how Yeats's mind and thought relate to his poetry, drama, and prose, and how his reading informs all of them.
Author: Marjorie Elizabeth Howes
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521650895
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 226
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Book Description
A comprehensive and accessible introduction to the major themes of this important poet's life and career.
