Read complete books and articles on: W. B. Yeats

Yeats, W. B. - (William Butler Yeats), 1865–1939, Irish poet and playwright, b. Dublin. The greatest lyric poet Ireland has produced and one of the major figures of 20th-century literature, Yeats was the acknowledged leader of the Irish literary renaissance.

Early Life

Son of the painter John Butler Yeats, William studied painting in Dublin (1883–86). As a boy he attended school in

Early Life

Son of the painter John Butler Yeats, William studied painting in Dublin (1883–86). As a boy he attended school in London and spent vacations in County Sligo, Ireland, which was the setting for many of his poems. He became fascinated by Irish legends and by the occult. His first work, the drama Mosada (1886), reflects his concern with magic, but the long poems in The Wanderings of Oisin (1889) voiced the intense nationalism of the Young Ireland movement.

Poetry: First Period

Yeats's verse can be divided into two periods, the first lasting from 1886 to about 1900. The poetry of this period shows a debt to Spenser, Shelley, and the Pre-Raphaelites. It centers on Irish mythology and themes and is mystical, slow-paced, and lyrical. Among the best-known poems of the period are "Falling of Leaves," "When You Are Old," and "The Lake Isle of Innisfree." Yeats edited William Blake's works in 1893, and his own Poems were collected in 1895.

Drama and Prose

Yeats's efforts to foster Irish nationalism were inspired for years by Maud Gonne, an Irish patriot for whom he had a hopeless passion and to whom he repeatedly and fruitlessly proposed marriage. In 1898 with Lady Augusta Gregory, George Moore, and Edward Martyn he founded the Irish Literary Theatre in Dublin; their first production (1899) was Yeats's The Countess Cathleen (written 1889–92). Yeats helped produce plays and collaborated with Lady Gregory on the comedy The Pot of Broth (1929) and other plays. The Irish Literary Theatre produced several of Yeats's plays including Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902), and—after the Abbey Theatre was opened—The Hour Glass (1904), The Land of Heart's Desire (1904), and Deirdre (1907). Yeats's prose tales of Irish legend were collected in The Celtic Twilight (1893) and in the symbolic The Secret Rose (1897).

Poetry: Second Period, and Later Life

Yeats's poetry deepened as he grew older. In the verse of his middle and late years he renounced his early transcendentalism; his poetry became stronger, more physical and realistic. A recurring theme is the polarity between extremes such as the physical and the spiritual, the real and the imagined. Memorable poems from this period include "The Second Coming," "The Tower," and "Sailing to Byzantium." Yeats initiated his second period in such volumes as In the Seven Woods (1903) and The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910). In 1917 he married Bertha Georgiana Hyde-Lees (known as Georgie or George), and his occultism was encouraged by his wife's automatic writing. His prose work A Vision (1937; privately printed 1926) is the basis of much of his poetry in The Wild Swans at Coole (1917) and Four Plays for Dancers (1921).

Yeats ultimately became a respected public figure, a member (1922–28) of the Irish senate, and winner of the 1923 Nobel Prize in Literature. Some of his best work was his last, The Tower (1928) and Last Poems (1940). All of Yeats's work shows interesting and important revisions from earlier to later versions (see The Variorum Edition of his poems, ed. by Peter Allt and Russell R. Alspach, 1957).

Bibliography

A Bibliography of the Writings of W. B. Yeats was prepared by A. Wade (3d ed., ed by R. K. Alspach, 1968). See also Yeats's Autobiographies (new ed. 1999), Collected Letters (3 vol., ed. by J. Kelly et al., 1986–), Memoirs (ed. by D. Donoghue, 1973), Collected Poems (new ed., 2d ed. 1997), Collected Plays (enl. ed., reissued 1952), Mythologies (1959), Senate Speeches (ed. by D. R. Pearce, 1960), and Essays and Introductions (1961).

See also biographies by H. Bloom (1970), A. N. Jeffares (1989), T. Brown (1999), B. Maddox (1999), and R. F. Foster (2 vol., 1997–2003); studies by T. F. Parkinson (1951 and 1964), R. Ellmann (2d ed. 1964), P. L. Marcus (1970), J. R. Moore (1971), and A. N. Jeffares (1977).

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14 of the Best Books and Articles on: W. B. Yeats

as selected by Questia librarians

1.

Yeats » Read Now
by Harold Bloom. 500 pgs.

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2.

Plays and Controversies ("Countess Cathleen" begins on p. 219, and "The Land of Heart's Desire" begins on p. 297) » Read Now
by W. B. Yeats. 474 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

...CONTROVERSIES BY W. B. YEATS New York THE MACMILLAN...virtue seemed possible. W. B. YEATS. DUBLIN, February 1923...will be extended to Mr. Yeats and his friends. I...
3.

Responsibilities: And Other Poems » Read Now
by William Butler Yeats. 188 pgs.

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...TORONTO RESPONSIBILITIES AND OTHER POEMS BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS New York THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1916 All rights reserved COPYRIGHT, 1911 BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS COPYRIGHT...
4.

Senate Speeches of W. B. Yeats » Read Now
by William Butler Yeats, Donald R. Pearce. 186 pgs.

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...The Senate Speeches of W. B. YEATS The Senate Speeches of W. B. YEATS edited by DONALD R. PEARCE INDIANA UNIVERSITY...especially to express sincere thanks to Mrs. W. B...
5.

Tragic Victory: The Doctrine of Subjective Salvation in the Poetry of W. B. Yeats » Read Now
by Larry Brunner. 184 pgs.

Collections: Religious Studies, Philosophy, Literature, Entire Library
6.

Running to Paradise: Yeats's Poetic Art » Read Now
by M. L. Rosenthal. 368 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

In Running to Paradise, M.L. Rosenthal, hailed by the Times Literary Supplement as "one of the most important critics of twentieth-century poetry," leads us through the lyric poetry and poetic drama of our century's greatest poet in English. His readings shed new, vivid light on Yeats's daring uses...
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In Running to Paradise, M.L. Rosenthal, hailed by the Times Literary Supplement as "one of the most important critics of twentieth-century poetry," leads us through the lyric poetry and poetic drama of our century's greatest poet in English. His readings shed new, vivid light on Yeats's daring uses of tradition, his love poetry, and the way he faced the often tragic realities of revolution and civil war. Running to Paradise describes Yeats's whole effort--sometimes leavened by wild humor--to convey, with high poetic integrity, his passionate sense of his own life and of his chaotic era. Himself a noted poet, Rosenthal stresses Yeats's artistry and psychological candor. The book ranges from his early exquisite lyrical poems and folklore-rooted plays, through the tougher-minded, more confessional mature work (including the sublime achievement of The Tower), and then to the sometimes "mad" yet often brilliant tragic or comic writing of his last years. Quoting extensively from Yeats, Rosenthal charts the gathering force with which the poet confronted his major life-issues: his art's demands, his persistent but hopeless love for one woman, the complexities of marriage to another woman at age 52, and his distress during Ireland's "Troubles." Yeats's deep absorption in female sensibility, in the cycles of history and human thought, and in supernaturalism and "the dead" comes strongly into play as well.
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7.

Yeats and the Logic of Formalism » Read Now
by Vereen M. Bell. 201 pgs.

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8.

What Rough Beast? Yeats, Nietzsche and Historical Rhetoric in "The Second Coming", in Papers on Language & Literature » Read Now
by John R. Harrison. 27 pgs.

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...Drake, Nicholas. The Poetry of W. B. Yeats. London: Penguin, 1991. Ellman...Commentary on the Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. London: Macmillan, 1968. Kaufmann...Princeton...
9.

The Politics of Irish Literature: From Thomas Davis to W. B. Yeats » Read Now
by Malcolm Brown. 431 pgs.

Collections: History, Literature, Entire Library
10.

Modernism and Mass Politics: Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, Yeats » Read Now
by Michael Tratner. 288 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

Exploring the link between modernist literature and early twentieth century theories of crowd psychology, this study reinterprets the development of literary modernism.
11.

Modernism and Eugenics: Woolf, Eliot, Yeats, and the Culture of Degeneration » Read Now
by Donald J. Childs. 266 pgs.

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In Modernism and Eugenics, Donald Childs reveals how Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, and W.B. Yeats believed in eugenics, the science of racial improvement, and adapted this scientific discourse to the language and purposes of the modern imagination. He traces the impact of the eugenics movement on such...
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In Modernism and Eugenics, Donald Childs reveals how Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, and W.B. Yeats believed in eugenics, the science of racial improvement, and adapted this scientific discourse to the language and purposes of the modern imagination. He traces the impact of the eugenics movement on such modernist works as Mrs. Dalloway, The Waste Land, and Yeats's late poetry and early plays. This is an original study of a controversial theme which reveals the centrality of eugenics in the life and work of several major modernist writers.
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12.

States of Desire: Wilde, Yeats, Joyce, and the Irish Experiment » Read Now
by Vicki Mahaffey. 276 pgs.

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This book is an intimate study of the three giants in Irish literary history: Oscar Wilde, William Butler Yeats, and James Joyce. In addition to constructing a narrative of Irelands political and literary past, Vicki Mahaffey interweaves the lives and writing of the authors into a portrait of...
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This book is an intimate study of the three giants in Irish literary history: Oscar Wilde, William Butler Yeats, and James Joyce. In addition to constructing a narrative of Irelands political and literary past, Vicki Mahaffey interweaves the lives and writing of the authors into a portrait of national imagination, shaped not only by a vast cultural and mythic heritage, but also by the hard fact of English political domination. States of Desire argues that what people desire is fundamentally connected to how they write and read. Not only do language and narrative shape desire (and vice versa), but because these processes are socially conditioned, some political circumstances, such as those present in Ireland at the turn of the century, foster experimental desire more successfully than others. Mahaffey's contribution to the critical discourse on literary modernism is to assign a political motive to the art of modernist wordplay; in doing so, she offers a more compelling and socially driven version of the oft-told tale of literary modernism. Irish writers, she argues, sought to disrupt the rigidity of political thinking and social control by turning language into a weapon; by opening up infinite new possibilities of meaning and association, linguistic play makes it impossible for thought to be monopolized by the state or any other institutional power. In this light, the text becomes a prism of political, cultural, and erotic desires: a fountain of conscious and unconscious linguistic suggestion. Defying semantic control and refuting societal repression, Wilde, Yeats, and Joyce literally fought, in their lives and in their work, for a freedom of expression which--as was painfully evidenced in the case of Wilde--was not to be had for the asking.
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13.

Yeats: The Nineteenth Century Matrix » Read Now
by Dwight Eddins. 176 pgs.

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14.

It Will Be a Hard Toil: Yeats's Theory of Versification, 1899-1919, in Journal of Modern Literature » Read Now
by William J. Wenthe. 20 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

...changes in poetry in this century. W.B. Yeats is among many poets in this tradition...Knopf, 1955 ). p. 240. 2 W. B. Yeats, "Per Amica Silentia Lunae", in...3 Yeats, The...