W. B. Yeats

First Sentence

This guide to Yeats criticism presumes a certain familiarity with the primary Yeats texts. The best criticism challenges our assumptions of reading and draws our attention to unnoticed aspects of a text, but it always remains an ancillary occupation, forever dependent on the quiet savouring of the original text. The history and sociology of Yeats criticism has important uses and can extend our knowledge of the writer, but it can never replace the active, imaginative involvement on the part of the reader. This account of Yeats criticism accepts, therefore, the limitations of such an inquiry, while at the same time recognising two provisos: firstly, that all criticism attempts to come between the reader and the text, and, secondly, that all texts read us as much as we read them. The ideal way to read Yeats is from start to finish, from The Wanderings of Oisin (WO, 1889) to The Death of Cuchulain (DC, 1939), but for the student encountering Yeats on a modern literature course this is a daunting, if not impossible, task. After studying Yeats, students often feel perplexed - a mixture of fascination for his strange ideas, an appreciation of his early love poems, astonishment at the compression of thought in a poem such as 'Among School Children', but an uneasiness about his overall achievement. Yeats is difficult for a number of reasons. Firstly, his work is so varied that he cannot readily be 'sampled'. Secondly, his dialectical mode of thinking resists the reassurance of the handy summary. Thirdly, the course of his development as a writer, spanning as it does the 19th and the 20th centuries, is never easy to plot. Fourthly, with its strange mythology, unfamiliar history, and often unpronounceable names, his work often seems remote to non-Irish readers.

Description

Chapter 1: Introduction Preliminary Remarks; Biographies of Yeats; Introductory Studies; Bibliographical Details Chapter 2: Yeats’s Poetry The Process of Composition; The Order of the Poems; 'The Sacred Book of the Arts'; The Finneran debate; The Reception of Yeats’s Verse; An early trilogy; Yeats and symbolism; Yeats’s lineage; Yeats’s poetry and his beliefs Chapter 3: Yeats’s Drama Introductions and Texts; Yeats’s Theatre; The poet in the theatre; The Abbey Theatre; 'An unpopular theatre'; Yeats’s Plays; The Cuchulain cycle; Last plays Chapter 4: Yeats’s Prose Yeats as Story-teller; Yeats and Autobiography; A Vision and the Occult; Yeats’s occult activities; Per Amica Silentia Lunae; A Vision Chapter 5: Yeats and the Irish Context Yeats and 19th-century Ireland; Yeats and the oral tradition; Yeats and the literary tradition; Yeats and 18th-century Ireland; Yeats and Modern Ireland; Yeats in his own period; Yeats and later Irish writers; Yeats and Fascism Chapter 6: Yeats and the Contemporary Critical Perspective Yeats and Literary Language; Yeats and Women; Yeats and the Visual Arts; Yeats and Modern Literature; Yeats and Nietzsche; Yeats and modernism; Yeats and modern culture Bibliography

Subjects

Series Statement

• State of the art series