W B Yeats
Biographic Data
| ID | 713512 |
|---|---|
| NAME | W B Yeats |
| GIVEN NAMES | W B |
| FAMILY NAME | Yeats |
| SIGNATURE | YEATS W B |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 58 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 9 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 58 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1899 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Yeats Annual No. 18
pencil.This slip is pasted onto a torn-off printed slip
A Book of Irish Verse
In 1895 the thirty-year-old W.B. Yeats, already established as one of Ireland's leading poets and folklorists, published this outstanding collection of Irish verse as part of his campaign to establish a tradition of Irish poetry fit for the dawn of a new age in Ireland's history. This Routledge Classics edition, complete with a specially commissioned introduction by acclaimed writer and critic John Banville, is essential reading for all who appre…
Yeats's Political Identities
There are as many versions of W. B. Yeats as there are readers of his work: he is the poet of totalitarian force for some, the cultural nationalist and agent of decolonization for others; he is the elegist of the Anglo-Irish, yet also the witness of transcendental vision. In Yeats's Political Identities Jonathan Allison collects some of the most trenchant essays of the last three decades on what Yeats's politics were and how important they are fo…
The Celt in Ireland
I do not head this letter "The Celt in London" as my wont is, for I am back in Ireland for the time being, and writing out on the lawn of an old Irish thatched farmhouse.1 An apple tree covered with red apples shakes softly before me in the sunlight, and the paper on which I write rests on the stone top of a sundial. Behind me in the hedge a grasshopper has just lifted his shrill song. To talk of books at all on this green clover spotted grass se…
A New Commentary on the Poems of W. B. Yeats
To an Isle in the Water
Celtic Beliefs About the Soul
Le Mouvement Celtique
A Corinthian Club Dinner
Nationality and Literature
Visions and beliefs in the west of Ireland
This material collected over a period of more than twenty years proved to be a valuable source not only for Gregory's own plays but also for Yeats' work. A classic, it presents many aspects of the supernatural seers, healers, charms, banshees, forths, the evil eye and contains a treasure trove of Irish folk-beliefs from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
Jon Stall Worthy
Mythologies
A Vision
Contents: a packet for Ezra Pound; stories of Michael Robartes and his friends: an extract from a record made by his pupils; phases of moon; great wheel; completed symbol; soul in judgment; great year
The Great Year of the Ancients
Parnell
I n the late ’eighties I read in the newspapers that an Oxford undergraduate, Henry Harrison, had been tried, and whether condemned or acquitted I do not remember, for some gallant reckless action at an eviction in Donegal. Years afterwards I came to know him slightly, met him perhaps half a dozen times. Two or three weeks ago he walked into my garden, a man broken by time, and sat by my wheeled chair. He had, I knew, a life-long devotion to Parn…
Bishop Berkeley
Imagination, whether in literature, painting, Or sculpture, sank after the death of Shakespeare; supreme intensity had passed to another faculty; it was as though Shakespeare, Dante, Michelangelo, had been reborn with all their old sublimity, their old vastness of conception, but speaking a harsh, almost unintelligible, language. Two or three generations hence, when men accept the inventions of science as a commonplace and understand that it is l…
Gitanjali
A few days ago I said to a distinguished Bengali doctor of medicine, ‘I know no German, yet if a translation of a German poet had moved me, I would go to the British Museum and find books in English that would tell me something of his life, and of the history of his thought. But though these prose translations from Rabindranath Tagore have stirred my blood as nothing has for years, I shall not know anything of his life, and of the movements of th…
Ireland and the Arts
T he arts have failed ; fewer people are interested in them every generation. The mere business of living, of making money, of amusing oneself, occupies people more and more, and makes them less and less capable of the difficult art of appreciation. When they buy a picture it generally shows a long-current idea, or some conventional form that can be admired in that lax mood one admires a fine carriage in or fine horses in; and when they buy a boo…
William Blake and his Illustrations to the Divine Comedy
William Blake was the first writer of modern times to preach the indissoluble marriage of all great art with symbol. There had been allegorists and teachers of allegory in plenty, but the symbolic imagination, or, as Blake preferred to call it, ‘vision,’ is not allegory, being ‘a representation of what actually exists really and unchangeably.’ A symbol is indeed the only possible expression of some invisible essence, a transparent lamp about a sp…
The Moods
L iterature differs from explanatory and scientific writing in being wrought about a mood, or a community of moods, as the body is wrought about an invisible soul; and if it uses argument, theory, erudition, observation, and seems to grow hot in assertion or denial, it does so merely to make us partakers at the banquet of the moods. It seems to me that these moods are the labourers and messengers of the Ruler of All, the gods of ancient days stil…
The Galway Plains
L ady G regory has just given me her beautiful Poets and Dreamers , and it has brought to mind a day two or three years ago when I stood on the side of Slieve Echtge, looking out over Galway. The Burren Hills were to my left, and though I forget whether I could see the cairn over Bald Conan of the Fianna, I could certainly see many places there that are in poems and stories. In front of me, over many miles of level Galway plains, I saw a low blue…
Speaking to the Psaltery
I have always known that there was something I disliked about singing, and I naturally dislike print and paper, but now at last I understand why, for I have found something better. I have just heard a poem spoken with so delicate a sense of its rhythm, with so perfect a respect for its meaning, that if I were a wise man and could persuade a few people to learn the art I would never open a book of verses again. A friend, who was here a few minutes…
The Body of the Father Christian Rosencrux
T he followers of the Father Christian Rosencrux, says the old tradition, wrapped his imperishable body in noble raiment and laid it under the house of their Order, in a tomb containing the symbols of all things in heaven and earth, and in the waters under the earth, and set about him inextinguishable magical lamps, which burnt on generation after generation, until other students of the Order came upon the tomb by chance. It seems to me that the …
Preface to the First Edition of The Well of the Saints
Letters to the New Island
Illustrations - List of Abbreviations - Editors' Textual Preface - Editors' Introduction - Letters to the New Island - Preface - Irish Writers who are Winning Fame - Some Forthcoming Irish Books - What the Writers and Thinkers are Doing - Chevalier Burke: 'Shule Aroon', Carleton and the Banims' Novels, an Autograph Sale at Sotheby's, William Allingham, Miss Ellen O'Leary - Browning: A New School, Edward Carpenter, Mr Curtin's Irish Myths and Folk…
Yeats's Political Identities
There are as many versions of W. B. Yeats as there are readers of his work: he is the poet of totalitarian force for some, the cultural nationalist and agent of decolonization for others; he is the elegist of the Anglo-Irish, yet also the witness of transcendental vision. In Yeats's Political Identities Jonathan Allison collects some of the most trenchant essays of the last three decades on what Yeats's politics were and how important they are fo…
To discover a Drowned Body
Letters to the New Island
Illustrations - List of Abbreviations - Editors' Textual Preface - Editors' Introduction - Letters to the New Island - Preface - Irish Writers who are Winning Fame - Some Forthcoming Irish Books - What the Writers and Thinkers are Doing - Chevalier Burke: 'Shule Aroon', Carleton and the Banims' Novels, an Autograph Sale at Sotheby's, William Allingham, Miss Ellen O'Leary - Browning: A New School, Edward Carpenter, Mr Curtin's Irish Myths and Folk…
Parnell
I n the late ’eighties I read in the newspapers that an Oxford undergraduate, Henry Harrison, had been tried, and whether condemned or acquitted I do not remember, for some gallant reckless action at an eviction in Donegal. Years afterwards I came to know him slightly, met him perhaps half a dozen times. Two or three weeks ago he walked into my garden, a man broken by time, and sat by my wheeled chair. He had, I knew, a life-long devotion to Parn…
Bishop Berkeley
Imagination, whether in literature, painting, Or sculpture, sank after the death of Shakespeare; supreme intensity had passed to another faculty; it was as though Shakespeare, Dante, Michelangelo, had been reborn with all their old sublimity, their old vastness of conception, but speaking a harsh, almost unintelligible, language. Two or three generations hence, when men accept the inventions of science as a commonplace and understand that it is l…
Gitanjali
A few days ago I said to a distinguished Bengali doctor of medicine, ‘I know no German, yet if a translation of a German poet had moved me, I would go to the British Museum and find books in English that would tell me something of his life, and of the history of his thought. But though these prose translations from Rabindranath Tagore have stirred my blood as nothing has for years, I shall not know anything of his life, and of the movements of th…
Ireland and the Arts
T he arts have failed ; fewer people are interested in them every generation. The mere business of living, of making money, of amusing oneself, occupies people more and more, and makes them less and less capable of the difficult art of appreciation. When they buy a picture it generally shows a long-current idea, or some conventional form that can be admired in that lax mood one admires a fine carriage in or fine horses in; and when they buy a boo…
William Blake and his Illustrations to the Divine Comedy
William Blake was the first writer of modern times to preach the indissoluble marriage of all great art with symbol. There had been allegorists and teachers of allegory in plenty, but the symbolic imagination, or, as Blake preferred to call it, ‘vision,’ is not allegory, being ‘a representation of what actually exists really and unchangeably.’ A symbol is indeed the only possible expression of some invisible essence, a transparent lamp about a sp…
The Moods
L iterature differs from explanatory and scientific writing in being wrought about a mood, or a community of moods, as the body is wrought about an invisible soul; and if it uses argument, theory, erudition, observation, and seems to grow hot in assertion or denial, it does so merely to make us partakers at the banquet of the moods. It seems to me that these moods are the labourers and messengers of the Ruler of All, the gods of ancient days stil…
The Galway Plains
L ady G regory has just given me her beautiful Poets and Dreamers , and it has brought to mind a day two or three years ago when I stood on the side of Slieve Echtge, looking out over Galway. The Burren Hills were to my left, and though I forget whether I could see the cairn over Bald Conan of the Fianna, I could certainly see many places there that are in poems and stories. In front of me, over many miles of level Galway plains, I saw a low blue…
Speaking to the Psaltery
I have always known that there was something I disliked about singing, and I naturally dislike print and paper, but now at last I understand why, for I have found something better. I have just heard a poem spoken with so delicate a sense of its rhythm, with so perfect a respect for its meaning, that if I were a wise man and could persuade a few people to learn the art I would never open a book of verses again. A friend, who was here a few minutes…
The Body of the Father Christian Rosencrux
T he followers of the Father Christian Rosencrux, says the old tradition, wrapped his imperishable body in noble raiment and laid it under the house of their Order, in a tomb containing the symbols of all things in heaven and earth, and in the waters under the earth, and set about him inextinguishable magical lamps, which burnt on generation after generation, until other students of the Order came upon the tomb by chance. It seems to me that the …
Preface to the First Edition of The Well of the Saints
The Symbolism of Poetry
S ymbolism , as seen in the writers of our day, would have no value if it were not seen also, under one ‘disguise or another, in every great imaginative writer,’ writes Mr. Arthur Symons in The Symbolist Movement in Literature , a subtle book which I cannot praise as I would, because it has been dedicated to me; and he goes on to show how many profound writers have in the last few years sought for a philosophy of poetry in the doctrine of symboli…
The Holy Mountain
‘I know nothing but the novels of Balzac, and the Aphorisms of Patanjali. I once knew other things, but I am an old man with a poor memory.’ There must be some reason why I wanted to write that lying sentence, for it has been in my head for weeks. Is it that whenever I have been tempted to go to Japan, China, or India for my philosophy, Balzac has brought me back, reminded me of my preoccupation with national, social, personal problems, convinced…
Preface to the First Edition of John M. Synge’s Poems and Translations
Art and Ideas
T wo days ago I was at the Tate Gallery to see the early Millais’s, and before his Ophelia , as before the Mary Magdalene and Mary of Galilee of Rossetti that hung near, I recovered an old emotion. I saw these pictures as I had seen pictures in my childhood. I forgot the art criticism of friends and saw wonderful, sad, happy people, moving through the scenery of my dreams. The painting of the hair, the way it was smoothed from its central parting…
The Autumn of the Body
O ur thoughts and emotions are often but spray flung up from hidden tides that follow a moon no eye can see. I remember that when I first began to write I desired to describe outward things as vividly as possible, and took pleasure, in which there was, perhaps, a little discontent, in picturesque and declamatory books. And then quite suddenly I lost the desire of describing outward things, and found that I took little pleasure in a book unless it…
Symbolism in Painting
I n E ngland , which has made great Symbolic Art, most people dislike an art if they are told it is symbolic, for they confuse symbol and allegory. Even Johnson’s Dictionary sees no great difference, for it calls a symbol ‘That which comprehends in its figure a representation of something else’; and an allegory ‘A figurative discourse, in which something other is intended than is contained in the words literally taken.’ It is only a very modem Di…
An Indian Monk
I wrote an introduction to the beautiful Gitanjali A of Tagore, and now, twenty years afterwards, draw attention to a book that may prove of comparable importance, An Indian Monk , by Shri Purohit Swāmi. A little more than a year ago I met its author, but lately arrived in Europe, at Mr. Sturge Moore’s house. He had been sent by his Master, or spiritual director, that he might interpret the religious life of India, but had no fixed plan. Perhaps …
The Tragic Theatre
I did not find a word in the printed criticism of Synge’s Deirdre of the Sorrows about the qualities that made certain moments seem to me the noblest tragedy, and the play was judged by what seemed to me but wheels and pulleys necessary to the effect, but in themselves nothing. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
What Is ‘Popular Poetry’?
I think it was a Young Ireland Society that Set my mind running on ‘popular poetry.’ We used to discuss everything that was known to us about Ireland, and especially Irish literature and Irish history. We had no Gaelic, but paid great honour to the Irish poets who wrote in English, and quoted them in our speeches. I could have told you at that time the dates of the birth and death, and quoted the chief poems, of men whose names you have not heard…
The Happiest of the Poets
R ossetti in one of his letters numbers his favourite colours in the order of his favour, and throughout his work one feels that he loved form and colour for themselves and apart from what they represent. One feels sometimes that he desired a world of essences, of unmixed powers, of impossible purities. It is as though the Last Judgment had already begun in his mind and that the essences and powers, which the Divine Hand had mixed into one anothe…
The Theatre
I remember , some years ago, advising a distinguished, though too little recognised, writer of poetical plays to write a play as unlike ordinary plays as possible, that it might be judged with a fresh mind, and to put it on the stage in some little suburban hall, where a little audience would pay its expenses. I said that he should follow it the year after, at the same time of the year, with another play, and so on from year to year; and that the…
William Blake and the Imagination
There have been men who loved the future like a mistress, and the future mixed her breath into their breath and shook her hair about them, and hid them from the understanding of their times. William Blake was one of these men, and if he spoke confusedly and obscurely it was because he spoke of things for whose speaking he could find no models in the world he knew. He announced the religion of art, of which no man dreamed in the world he knew; and…
Edmund Spenser
W e know little of Spenser’s childhood and nothing of his parents, except that his father was probably an Edmund Spenser of north-east Lancashire, a man of good blood and belonging to ‘a house of ancient fame.’ He was bom in London in 15 52, nineteen years after the death of Ariosto, and when Tasso was about eight years old. Full of the spirit of the Renaissance, at once passionate and artificial, looking out upon the world now as craftsman, now …
Art (50 works) · Literature (38 works) · Philosophy (35 works) · History (33 works) · Art history (21 works) · Irish and British Studies (18 works) · Psychology (16 works) · Aesthetics (15 works) · Poetry (14 works) · Epistemology (13 works)