R. F. Foster
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780197264249
- eISBN:
- 9780191734045
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197264249.003.0012
- Subject:
- History, Cultural History
This lecture traces W. B. Yeats' preoccupation with the changing forms of death throughout his life, from his fin-de-siécle love-poetry to his poems of death. These poems of death were linked to his ...
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This lecture traces W. B. Yeats' preoccupation with the changing forms of death throughout his life, from his fin-de-siécle love-poetry to his poems of death. These poems of death were linked to his interest in Celtic legend, Irish intellectual influences and conjunctions, and magical ritual and psychic research. The lecture considers Yeats' approach to death in his later work, concluding with his creation of a structured canon of work in the light of his own death and the work that he wrote on his deathbed.Less
This lecture traces W. B. Yeats' preoccupation with the changing forms of death throughout his life, from his fin-de-siécle love-poetry to his poems of death. These poems of death were linked to his interest in Celtic legend, Irish intellectual influences and conjunctions, and magical ritual and psychic research. The lecture considers Yeats' approach to death in his later work, concluding with his creation of a structured canon of work in the light of his own death and the work that he wrote on his deathbed.
Tara Stubbs
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780719084331
- eISBN:
- 9781781705841
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719084331.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
In the modernist period, the ways in which American writers made use of Yeats differed from individual to individual: as each grappled with the impact of Yeats’s poetry and writings on their own ...
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In the modernist period, the ways in which American writers made use of Yeats differed from individual to individual: as each grappled with the impact of Yeats’s poetry and writings on their own work. This chapter therefore takes as its focus individual poets and critics who engaged directly with Yeats as man and poet. It considers, through Moore, the 1910s to early 1930s when his star was in the ascendant in America; through Berryman and Bogan, the mid to late 1930s when Yeats and others were contemplating his legacy; and through Deutsch, the decades immediately following his death. This biographical and critical framework allows for an assessment of influence as both direct and active – in the physical presence of the living (or recently dead) poet – and poetic and allusive, in the shadowing of the poet’s works in the works of the poets who follow him. But the story necessarily begins with the moment(s) that Yeats’s writings were first introduced to his American readers.Less
In the modernist period, the ways in which American writers made use of Yeats differed from individual to individual: as each grappled with the impact of Yeats’s poetry and writings on their own work. This chapter therefore takes as its focus individual poets and critics who engaged directly with Yeats as man and poet. It considers, through Moore, the 1910s to early 1930s when his star was in the ascendant in America; through Berryman and Bogan, the mid to late 1930s when Yeats and others were contemplating his legacy; and through Deutsch, the decades immediately following his death. This biographical and critical framework allows for an assessment of influence as both direct and active – in the physical presence of the living (or recently dead) poet – and poetic and allusive, in the shadowing of the poet’s works in the works of the poets who follow him. But the story necessarily begins with the moment(s) that Yeats’s writings were first introduced to his American readers.
Alan Gillis
- Published in print:
- 2005
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780199277094
- eISBN:
- 9780191707483
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199277094.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
The 1930s have never really been considered an epoch within Irish literature, even though this period forms one of the most dominant and fascinating contexts in modern British literature. This book ...
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The 1930s have never really been considered an epoch within Irish literature, even though this period forms one of the most dominant and fascinating contexts in modern British literature. This book shows that during this time Irish poets confronted political pressures and aesthetic dilemmas which frequently overlapped with those associated with ‘The Auden Generation’. In doing so, it offers a provocative rereading of Irish literary history, but also offers powerful arguments about the way poetry in general is interpreted and understood. In this way, the book redefines our understanding of a frequently neglected period and challenges received notions of both Irish literature and poetic modernism. Moreover, the book offers detailed and vital readings of the major Irish poets of the decade, including original and exciting analyses of Samuel Beckett, Patrick Kavanagh, and Louis MacNeice; with a major re-evaluation of W. B. Yeats.Less
The 1930s have never really been considered an epoch within Irish literature, even though this period forms one of the most dominant and fascinating contexts in modern British literature. This book shows that during this time Irish poets confronted political pressures and aesthetic dilemmas which frequently overlapped with those associated with ‘The Auden Generation’. In doing so, it offers a provocative rereading of Irish literary history, but also offers powerful arguments about the way poetry in general is interpreted and understood. In this way, the book redefines our understanding of a frequently neglected period and challenges received notions of both Irish literature and poetic modernism. Moreover, the book offers detailed and vital readings of the major Irish poets of the decade, including original and exciting analyses of Samuel Beckett, Patrick Kavanagh, and Louis MacNeice; with a major re-evaluation of W. B. Yeats.
Wayne K. Chapman
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780983533924
- eISBN:
- 9781781382219
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9780983533924.003.0009
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
This essay examines the relationship between A Vision and W. B. Yeats’s poems and plays, as well as a number of sources of creative inspiration, both literary and cosmographic. While writing A Vision ...
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This essay examines the relationship between A Vision and W. B. Yeats’s poems and plays, as well as a number of sources of creative inspiration, both literary and cosmographic. While writing A Vision A, Yeats also worked extensively on his “plays for dancers,” including an unfinished fifth play, titled here “Guardians of the Tower and Stream.” Similarly later poems and plays, many written in the same notebooks as the drafts for A Vision B, often share important genetic elements. Beyond the poems actually included in the versions of A Vision, the essay traces a wide range of connections including considerations of the “plays for dancers,” “The Double Vision of Michael Robartes,” the sequences “A Man Young and Old” and “A Woman Young and Old,” Milton’s “Il Penseroso” and The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, Chaucer’s Treatise on the Astrolabe, Donne’s “Nocturnall Upon S. Lucies Day,” Blake’s “The Mental Traveller,” and Macrobius’s commentary on Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis.Less
This essay examines the relationship between A Vision and W. B. Yeats’s poems and plays, as well as a number of sources of creative inspiration, both literary and cosmographic. While writing A Vision A, Yeats also worked extensively on his “plays for dancers,” including an unfinished fifth play, titled here “Guardians of the Tower and Stream.” Similarly later poems and plays, many written in the same notebooks as the drafts for A Vision B, often share important genetic elements. Beyond the poems actually included in the versions of A Vision, the essay traces a wide range of connections including considerations of the “plays for dancers,” “The Double Vision of Michael Robartes,” the sequences “A Man Young and Old” and “A Woman Young and Old,” Milton’s “Il Penseroso” and The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, Chaucer’s Treatise on the Astrolabe, Donne’s “Nocturnall Upon S. Lucies Day,” Blake’s “The Mental Traveller,” and Macrobius’s commentary on Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis.
Michael Wood
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199557660
- eISBN:
- 9780191701726
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199557660.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This is a book about how poetry, seen through the instance of a single poem, seeks to make sense of a turbulent and dangerous world. Poetry must introduce order and shape where there is none, and ...
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This is a book about how poetry, seen through the instance of a single poem, seeks to make sense of a turbulent and dangerous world. Poetry must introduce order and shape where there is none, and also, in certain crucial cases, remain faithful to the disorder and shapelessness of experience. Many poems manage the first of these tasks; very few manage both. W. B. Yeats ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’ (written and first published in 1921) is one of them. It is a work which asks what happens when what is taken to be civilization crumbles. What apocalyptic events wait in the wings? What are history's victims (and executors) to do except mock and mourn? Successive chapters investigate the six parts of the poem, connecting them to Yeats' broader poetic practice, his interest in the occult and his changing vision of Irish nationalism; to the work of other poets (Irish, English, Russian German); and to Irish and European history between 1916 (the date of the Easter Uprising in Dublin) and 1923 (the date of the end of the Irish Civil War). Theoretical considerations of the shape and meaning of violence, both political and religious, link the chapters to each other.Less
This is a book about how poetry, seen through the instance of a single poem, seeks to make sense of a turbulent and dangerous world. Poetry must introduce order and shape where there is none, and also, in certain crucial cases, remain faithful to the disorder and shapelessness of experience. Many poems manage the first of these tasks; very few manage both. W. B. Yeats ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’ (written and first published in 1921) is one of them. It is a work which asks what happens when what is taken to be civilization crumbles. What apocalyptic events wait in the wings? What are history's victims (and executors) to do except mock and mourn? Successive chapters investigate the six parts of the poem, connecting them to Yeats' broader poetic practice, his interest in the occult and his changing vision of Irish nationalism; to the work of other poets (Irish, English, Russian German); and to Irish and European history between 1916 (the date of the Easter Uprising in Dublin) and 1923 (the date of the end of the Irish Civil War). Theoretical considerations of the shape and meaning of violence, both political and religious, link the chapters to each other.
David Rosen
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- October 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780300100716
- eISBN:
- 9780300129489
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300100716.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter first explores Yeats's professional distress expressed through his 1909 poem “Words.” It narrates his disenchantment with language, where language was for him once an artistic expression ...
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This chapter first explores Yeats's professional distress expressed through his 1909 poem “Words.” It narrates his disenchantment with language, where language was for him once an artistic expression that would help shape and change society, now became seemingly opposed to normal, healthy living. Part of this chapter's purpose, then, is to dispute and argue against the consensus that Yeats's adoption of the low register—or plain English—is crucial to his role in British Modernism. This chapter also explores how Yeats's use of plain English and his sudden awareness at the futility of language are closely related. It examines Yeats's work in autobiography in his collection of poems Responsibilities (1814) and in his memoirs and how the low register figures and seeps its way into these texts. Throughout this analysis of Yeats's work, careful attention is paid to his use of the low register.Less
This chapter first explores Yeats's professional distress expressed through his 1909 poem “Words.” It narrates his disenchantment with language, where language was for him once an artistic expression that would help shape and change society, now became seemingly opposed to normal, healthy living. Part of this chapter's purpose, then, is to dispute and argue against the consensus that Yeats's adoption of the low register—or plain English—is crucial to his role in British Modernism. This chapter also explores how Yeats's use of plain English and his sudden awareness at the futility of language are closely related. It examines Yeats's work in autobiography in his collection of poems Responsibilities (1814) and in his memoirs and how the low register figures and seeps its way into these texts. Throughout this analysis of Yeats's work, careful attention is paid to his use of the low register.
W.J. Mc Cormack
- Published in print:
- 1985
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198128069
- eISBN:
- 9780191671630
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198128069.003.0010
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter discusses Yeats' works, the concealed aspects of his poetry, and his commitment to symbolism. In addition, a discussion of Yeats' interest in Spencer, his edition of Blake and other ...
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This chapter discusses Yeats' works, the concealed aspects of his poetry, and his commitment to symbolism. In addition, a discussion of Yeats' interest in Spencer, his edition of Blake and other activities in which recognition of a different mode of writing and of interpretation is also present. The chapter also discusses the two movements in Yeats' works; the allegory and symbolism, both of which give insight into the discrete activities of modernism and discloses Yeats' historical position and the complex issues underlying his play, the Purgatory.Less
This chapter discusses Yeats' works, the concealed aspects of his poetry, and his commitment to symbolism. In addition, a discussion of Yeats' interest in Spencer, his edition of Blake and other activities in which recognition of a different mode of writing and of interpretation is also present. The chapter also discusses the two movements in Yeats' works; the allegory and symbolism, both of which give insight into the discrete activities of modernism and discloses Yeats' historical position and the complex issues underlying his play, the Purgatory.
W. B. Yeats
- Published in print:
- 2005
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748622054
- eISBN:
- 9780748651993
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748622054.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, African-American Literature
This chapter discusses the relationship between culture and ethnicity within W. B. Yeats's idea of ‘the Celt’. It is primarily focused on the 1890s and the early 1900s, and considers the role of ...
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This chapter discusses the relationship between culture and ethnicity within W. B. Yeats's idea of ‘the Celt’. It is primarily focused on the 1890s and the early 1900s, and considers the role of Yeats's Celticism within the political and cultural debates of that period. The chapter presents an account of Celticism that uses an approach which looks at the complicated interrelationships between culture and ethnicity within the four nations of the British Isles. It determines that Yeats's Celticism has its aesthetic bases in Arnold's Celtic essays and in London literary corruption, while its political roots are in the Irish nationalist tradition and in a Ruskinian anti-industrialism.Less
This chapter discusses the relationship between culture and ethnicity within W. B. Yeats's idea of ‘the Celt’. It is primarily focused on the 1890s and the early 1900s, and considers the role of Yeats's Celticism within the political and cultural debates of that period. The chapter presents an account of Celticism that uses an approach which looks at the complicated interrelationships between culture and ethnicity within the four nations of the British Isles. It determines that Yeats's Celticism has its aesthetic bases in Arnold's Celtic essays and in London literary corruption, while its political roots are in the Irish nationalist tradition and in a Ruskinian anti-industrialism.
Robert Welch
- Published in print:
- 1999
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198121879
- eISBN:
- 9780191671364
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198121879.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Drama, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This first chapter is a narrative of how a summer house owned by Florimand Comte de Basterot became the venue where the foundation of the Abbey started. W. B. Yeats, during his stay in the Duras, ...
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This first chapter is a narrative of how a summer house owned by Florimand Comte de Basterot became the venue where the foundation of the Abbey started. W. B. Yeats, during his stay in the Duras, dreamed of an Irish theatre, where his plays and Edward Martyn's could be performed. Together with Lady Gregory, Yeats exerted effort to raise funds to build this theatre. In a proposal written by Lady Gregory, she also added plans for the theatre, as well as the interest to perform certain Celtic and Irish plays every spring. The theatre they had in mind was going to be a venue where they could hope for audiences willing to listen to eloquent language by virtue of its appreciation of oratory. Yeats and his colleagues also expressed the intention to steer clear from the all political factionalism. Yeats, at the time expressed his dream of a theatre to Lady Gregory, also expressed that he was in a state of ‘leprosy of the modern’ — ‘tepid emotion and many aims’. The letter Lady Gregory sent out to her many influential friends garnered enough support and funds to create the Irish Literary Theatre. The Abbey Theatre has its roots in the Irish Literary Theatre and its inaugural performance was in 1899.Less
This first chapter is a narrative of how a summer house owned by Florimand Comte de Basterot became the venue where the foundation of the Abbey started. W. B. Yeats, during his stay in the Duras, dreamed of an Irish theatre, where his plays and Edward Martyn's could be performed. Together with Lady Gregory, Yeats exerted effort to raise funds to build this theatre. In a proposal written by Lady Gregory, she also added plans for the theatre, as well as the interest to perform certain Celtic and Irish plays every spring. The theatre they had in mind was going to be a venue where they could hope for audiences willing to listen to eloquent language by virtue of its appreciation of oratory. Yeats and his colleagues also expressed the intention to steer clear from the all political factionalism. Yeats, at the time expressed his dream of a theatre to Lady Gregory, also expressed that he was in a state of ‘leprosy of the modern’ — ‘tepid emotion and many aims’. The letter Lady Gregory sent out to her many influential friends garnered enough support and funds to create the Irish Literary Theatre. The Abbey Theatre has its roots in the Irish Literary Theatre and its inaugural performance was in 1899.
ELLEKE BOEHMER
- Published in print:
- 2005
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780198184454
- eISBN:
- 9780191714085
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198184454.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This chapter highlights cross-border interaction into the interdiscursive, late-imperial formation that was early 20th-century modernism. By examining in particular the salient cross-cultural ...
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This chapter highlights cross-border interaction into the interdiscursive, late-imperial formation that was early 20th-century modernism. By examining in particular the salient cross-cultural (Europe-Asia) associations investigated in the work of Anglo-Irish poet W. B. Yeats and the cosmopolitan writer, publisher, and anti-imperialist Leonard Woolf, the chapter determines whether the cross-border (‘cosmo-national’) contacts pursued by nationalist elites in the empire might have affected metropolitan cultural practices in any significant way.Less
This chapter highlights cross-border interaction into the interdiscursive, late-imperial formation that was early 20th-century modernism. By examining in particular the salient cross-cultural (Europe-Asia) associations investigated in the work of Anglo-Irish poet W. B. Yeats and the cosmopolitan writer, publisher, and anti-imperialist Leonard Woolf, the chapter determines whether the cross-border (‘cosmo-national’) contacts pursued by nationalist elites in the empire might have affected metropolitan cultural practices in any significant way.
Robert Welch
- Published in print:
- 1999
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198121879
- eISBN:
- 9780191671364
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198121879.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Drama, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
A century ago this year, productions of W. B. Yeats' The Countess Cathleen and Edward Martyn's The Heather Field inaugurated the Irish Literary Theatre, which was to take its name from its home in ...
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A century ago this year, productions of W. B. Yeats' The Countess Cathleen and Edward Martyn's The Heather Field inaugurated the Irish Literary Theatre, which was to take its name from its home in Abbey Street, Dublin. Despite riot, fire, and critical controversy, the Abbey Theatre has housed Ireland's National Theatre ever since. This is the first history of the Abbey to discuss the plays and the personalities in their underlying historical and political context, to give due weight to the theatre's work in Irish, and to take stock of its artistic and financial development up to the present. The research for the book draws extensively on archive sources, especially the manuscript holdings on the Abbey at the National Library of Ireland. Many outstanding plays are examined, with detailed analysis of their form and their affective and emotional content; and persistent themes in the Abbey's output are identified — visions of an ideal community; the revival of Irish; the hunger for land and money; the restrictions of a society undergoing profound change. But these are integrated with accounts of the Abbey's people, from Yeats, Martyn, and Lady Gregory, whose brainchild it was, to the actors, playwrights, directors, and managers who have followed — among them the Fays, Synge, O'Casey, Murray, Robinson, Shiels, Johnston, Murphy, Molloy, Friel, McGuiness, Deevy, Carr, and many others. The role of directors and policy-makers, and the struggle for financial security, subsidy, and new-style ‘partnerships’, is discussed as a crucial part of the theatre's continuing evolution.Less
A century ago this year, productions of W. B. Yeats' The Countess Cathleen and Edward Martyn's The Heather Field inaugurated the Irish Literary Theatre, which was to take its name from its home in Abbey Street, Dublin. Despite riot, fire, and critical controversy, the Abbey Theatre has housed Ireland's National Theatre ever since. This is the first history of the Abbey to discuss the plays and the personalities in their underlying historical and political context, to give due weight to the theatre's work in Irish, and to take stock of its artistic and financial development up to the present. The research for the book draws extensively on archive sources, especially the manuscript holdings on the Abbey at the National Library of Ireland. Many outstanding plays are examined, with detailed analysis of their form and their affective and emotional content; and persistent themes in the Abbey's output are identified — visions of an ideal community; the revival of Irish; the hunger for land and money; the restrictions of a society undergoing profound change. But these are integrated with accounts of the Abbey's people, from Yeats, Martyn, and Lady Gregory, whose brainchild it was, to the actors, playwrights, directors, and managers who have followed — among them the Fays, Synge, O'Casey, Murray, Robinson, Shiels, Johnston, Murphy, Molloy, Friel, McGuiness, Deevy, Carr, and many others. The role of directors and policy-makers, and the struggle for financial security, subsidy, and new-style ‘partnerships’, is discussed as a crucial part of the theatre's continuing evolution.
W.J. Mc Cormack
- Published in print:
- 1985
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198128069
- eISBN:
- 9780191671630
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198128069.003.0012
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
Purgatory is a play that resembles a dialogue poem which W. B. Yeats wrote at various stages of his life. This chapter discusses Yeats' Purgatory, its allusion and implication to Irish social history ...
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Purgatory is a play that resembles a dialogue poem which W. B. Yeats wrote at various stages of his life. This chapter discusses Yeats' Purgatory, its allusion and implication to Irish social history and German culture and its importance to Yeats' career. The chapter also focuses on the structure of the play, the metalinguistic aspect and metadramatic dimensions of the play, as well as on the fascistic tone that underlay Yeats' Purgatory.Less
Purgatory is a play that resembles a dialogue poem which W. B. Yeats wrote at various stages of his life. This chapter discusses Yeats' Purgatory, its allusion and implication to Irish social history and German culture and its importance to Yeats' career. The chapter also focuses on the structure of the play, the metalinguistic aspect and metadramatic dimensions of the play, as well as on the fascistic tone that underlay Yeats' Purgatory.
Neil Mann, Matthew Gibson, and Claire Nally (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780983533924
- eISBN:
- 9781781382219
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9780983533924.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
W. B. Yeats’s “A Vision”: Explications and Contexts is the first volume of essays dedicated to A Vision and the associated system developed by William Butler Yeats and his wife, George Yeats. A ...
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W. B. Yeats’s “A Vision”: Explications and Contexts is the first volume of essays dedicated to A Vision and the associated system developed by William Butler Yeats and his wife, George Yeats. A Vision is all-encompassing in its stated aims and scope, covering the nature of reality, the spiritual constitution of the human being, human life and afterlife, and the great trends and cycles of history. It invites a wide range of approaches, as demonstrated in the fourteen essays collected here, written by the foremost scholars in the field. After a preface outlining critical treatment of A Vision and Yeats’s occult interests over the years, the first six essays present explications of major themes in A Vision itself: the system’s underlying structure; incarnate life and the Faculties; discarnate life and the Principles; how Yeats relates the ideas to other concepts in philosophy; and his consideration of the historical process. Three further essays look at key elements of importance to the work: the divine and the Thirteenth Cone; astrology in the automatic script; and poetry within A Vision. The final five consider its context, in terms 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. Illustrated with over thirty figures and diagrams, the book has a full glossary of the Yeatses’ idiosyncratic terminology and an index.Less
W. B. Yeats’s “A Vision”: Explications and Contexts is the first volume of essays dedicated to A Vision and the associated system developed by William Butler Yeats and his wife, George Yeats. A Vision is all-encompassing in its stated aims and scope, covering the nature of reality, the spiritual constitution of the human being, human life and afterlife, and the great trends and cycles of history. It invites a wide range of approaches, as demonstrated in the fourteen essays collected here, written by the foremost scholars in the field. After a preface outlining critical treatment of A Vision and Yeats’s occult interests over the years, the first six essays present explications of major themes in A Vision itself: the system’s underlying structure; incarnate life and the Faculties; discarnate life and the Principles; how Yeats relates the ideas to other concepts in philosophy; and his consideration of the historical process. Three further essays look at key elements of importance to the work: the divine and the Thirteenth Cone; astrology in the automatic script; and poetry within A Vision. The final five consider its context, in terms 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. Illustrated with over thirty figures and diagrams, the book has a full glossary of the Yeatses’ idiosyncratic terminology and an index.
Neil Mann
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780983533924
- eISBN:
- 9781781382219
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9780983533924.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
This essay examines the concepts of God and the divine that feature in A Vision and the wider system, as seen in the preparatory material and drafts. It considers in particular the concept of the ...
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This essay examines the concepts of God and the divine that feature in A Vision and the wider system, as seen in the preparatory material and drafts. It considers in particular the concept of the Thirteenth Cone (earlier also Thirteenth Cycle), together with the phaseless Sphere, drawing together the scattered material that W. B. Yeats offers in A Vision B, and then teasing out some of the implications, particularly with relation to time and eternity. It then looks at the development of the Thirteenth Cone, including its place as the goal of the reincarnating soul. It also examines Yeats’s use of the concept in his 1930 diary and, further, how the different concepts express different, hierarchical aspects of the divine. It concludes with a consideration of how this understanding of divinity informs Yeats’s creative work.Less
This essay examines the concepts of God and the divine that feature in A Vision and the wider system, as seen in the preparatory material and drafts. It considers in particular the concept of the Thirteenth Cone (earlier also Thirteenth Cycle), together with the phaseless Sphere, drawing together the scattered material that W. B. Yeats offers in A Vision B, and then teasing out some of the implications, particularly with relation to time and eternity. It then looks at the development of the Thirteenth Cone, including its place as the goal of the reincarnating soul. It also examines Yeats’s use of the concept in his 1930 diary and, further, how the different concepts express different, hierarchical aspects of the divine. It concludes with a consideration of how this understanding of divinity informs Yeats’s creative work.
Michael Wood
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199557660
- eISBN:
- 9780191701726
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199557660.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
Yeats is a poet almost everyone associates with violence yet he very rarely uses the word violence itself in his verse. How can this be? Perhaps Yeats doesn't name violence much because for him it is ...
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Yeats is a poet almost everyone associates with violence yet he very rarely uses the word violence itself in his verse. How can this be? Perhaps Yeats doesn't name violence much because for him it is everywhere. Or shall we say he doesn't name it more often because for him it is not usually a concept but a practice that has many names and shapes and above all many instances, and it is the instances that matter. Violence changes for Yeats, and his own relation to it changes. There is something both foggy and cosy about the phrase ‘some sort of violence’; and we may feel the same about Yeats' late enthusiasm for conflict, which had all kinds of connections to his interest in fascism.Less
Yeats is a poet almost everyone associates with violence yet he very rarely uses the word violence itself in his verse. How can this be? Perhaps Yeats doesn't name violence much because for him it is everywhere. Or shall we say he doesn't name it more often because for him it is not usually a concept but a practice that has many names and shapes and above all many instances, and it is the instances that matter. Violence changes for Yeats, and his own relation to it changes. There is something both foggy and cosy about the phrase ‘some sort of violence’; and we may feel the same about Yeats' late enthusiasm for conflict, which had all kinds of connections to his interest in fascism.
Joseph M. Hassett
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- September 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199582907
- eISBN:
- 9780191723216
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582907.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This book explores how nine fascinating women inspired some of W.B. Yeats's most memorable poetry. Yeats's beliefs about poetic inspiration were remarkably akin to the Greek notion that a great poet ...
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This book explores how nine fascinating women inspired some of W.B. Yeats's most memorable poetry. Yeats's beliefs about poetic inspiration were remarkably akin to the Greek notion that a great poet is inspired and possessed by the feminine voices of the Muses, daughters of all powerful Zeus and Mnemosyne, goddess of memory. Influenced by the Pre‐Raphaelite idea of woman as ‘romantic and mysterious, still the priestess of her shrine,’ Yeats found his Muses in living women. The book examines the poetry inspired by these women in the context of the two principal Muse traditions, the Gnostic Wisdom tradition and the courtly love tradition of the troubadours, both of which can be understood as variants of the White Goddess theory propounded by Robert Graves. Given Yeats's belief that lyric poetry ‘is no rootless flower, but the speech of a man,’ exploring the relationship between poem and Muse brings new coherence to the poetry, illuminates the process of its creation, and unlocks the ‘second beauty’ to which Yeats referred when he said that ‘works of lyric genius, when the circumstances of their origin is known, gain a second a beauty, passing as it were out of literature and becoming life.’ As life emerges from the literature, the Muses are shown to be vibrant, accomplished personalities who shatter the stereotype of the Muse as a passive construct, and take their proper place as begetters of timeless poetry.Less
This book explores how nine fascinating women inspired some of W.B. Yeats's most memorable poetry. Yeats's beliefs about poetic inspiration were remarkably akin to the Greek notion that a great poet is inspired and possessed by the feminine voices of the Muses, daughters of all powerful Zeus and Mnemosyne, goddess of memory. Influenced by the Pre‐Raphaelite idea of woman as ‘romantic and mysterious, still the priestess of her shrine,’ Yeats found his Muses in living women. The book examines the poetry inspired by these women in the context of the two principal Muse traditions, the Gnostic Wisdom tradition and the courtly love tradition of the troubadours, both of which can be understood as variants of the White Goddess theory propounded by Robert Graves. Given Yeats's belief that lyric poetry ‘is no rootless flower, but the speech of a man,’ exploring the relationship between poem and Muse brings new coherence to the poetry, illuminates the process of its creation, and unlocks the ‘second beauty’ to which Yeats referred when he said that ‘works of lyric genius, when the circumstances of their origin is known, gain a second a beauty, passing as it were out of literature and becoming life.’ As life emerges from the literature, the Muses are shown to be vibrant, accomplished personalities who shatter the stereotype of the Muse as a passive construct, and take their proper place as begetters of timeless poetry.
Janis Haswell
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780983533924
- eISBN:
- 9781781382219
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9780983533924.003.0012
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
Mapping Yeats’s view of gender in A Vision requires extensive groundwork. The essay first considers how W. B. Yeats valorizes the feminine in relation to the divine, believes masculine and feminine ...
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Mapping Yeats’s view of gender in A Vision requires extensive groundwork. The essay first considers how W. B. Yeats valorizes the feminine in relation to the divine, believes masculine and feminine complementary, and posits a contrasexual Daimon, “the woman in me.” It looks at the erosion of the symbol system’s gender features as Yeats moves from the collaborative automatic script and A Vision A to the more philosophic A Vision B. The essay then examines two elements linked to the myth of Leda: “Stories of Michael Robartes and His Friends” and “Leda and the Swan.” It is important to understand Yeats’s complex view of the feminine without circumscribing gender or falsifying Yeats’s enactment of it in the symbol system. The self, for Yeats, is the result of continuous choices; gender provides the dynamic that frames those choices and reflects the two great dimensions of human life: concord and discord.Less
Mapping Yeats’s view of gender in A Vision requires extensive groundwork. The essay first considers how W. B. Yeats valorizes the feminine in relation to the divine, believes masculine and feminine complementary, and posits a contrasexual Daimon, “the woman in me.” It looks at the erosion of the symbol system’s gender features as Yeats moves from the collaborative automatic script and A Vision A to the more philosophic A Vision B. The essay then examines two elements linked to the myth of Leda: “Stories of Michael Robartes and His Friends” and “Leda and the Swan.” It is important to understand Yeats’s complex view of the feminine without circumscribing gender or falsifying Yeats’s enactment of it in the symbol system. The self, for Yeats, is the result of continuous choices; gender provides the dynamic that frames those choices and reflects the two great dimensions of human life: concord and discord.
Margaret Mills Harper
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780983533924
- eISBN:
- 9781781382219
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9780983533924.003.0011
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
This essay outlines the collaboration of George Yeats and W. B. Yeats in the creation of the automatic script and the system that grew out of it, published as A Vision. It considers her role and ...
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This essay outlines the collaboration of George Yeats and W. B. Yeats in the creation of the automatic script and the system that grew out of it, published as A Vision. It considers her role and importance, the nature of her mediumship, and of the spirit “communicators,” using both the Yeatses’ own terms of reference and more generally accepted ones. After an examination of the differences in emphasis and immediacy of expression in the two versions of A Vision, the essay looks at the development of A Vision from the first to second version in the light of the relationship between Yeats’s “Leo Africanus” letters and Per Amica Silentia Lunae (1917), and how these works in turn look forward to A Vision. Throughout, it highlights key questions of expression, voice, and authenticity, of authority and authorship, of invention and discovery.Less
This essay outlines the collaboration of George Yeats and W. B. Yeats in the creation of the automatic script and the system that grew out of it, published as A Vision. It considers her role and importance, the nature of her mediumship, and of the spirit “communicators,” using both the Yeatses’ own terms of reference and more generally accepted ones. After an examination of the differences in emphasis and immediacy of expression in the two versions of A Vision, the essay looks at the development of A Vision from the first to second version in the light of the relationship between Yeats’s “Leo Africanus” letters and Per Amica Silentia Lunae (1917), and how these works in turn look forward to A Vision. Throughout, it highlights key questions of expression, voice, and authenticity, of authority and authorship, of invention and discovery.
Tom Walker
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- October 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780198745150
- eISBN:
- 9780191806087
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198745150.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter considers the period in which the careers of MacNeice and W.B. Yeats overlapped. It highlights how Yeats was a contemporary as well as a precursor for MacNeice during the 1930s, a shift ...
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This chapter considers the period in which the careers of MacNeice and W.B. Yeats overlapped. It highlights how Yeats was a contemporary as well as a precursor for MacNeice during the 1930s, a shift in perspective that reveals the dynamic nature of the two poets’ interaction. Yeats’s critical responses placed the younger poet outside of an Irish poetic—part of a dialectical move in Yeats’s activities of the period, as under pressure in the political present and with an eye to different publics and posterities, he set at odds aspects of his own poetic legacy. MacNeice, meanwhile, is shown as being deeply engaged with Yeats’s poetry from the earliest stages of his career. He both questioned and used aspects of Yeats’s achievement in the context of his own developing poetic, and his wider ambivalence about Ireland and its literary mores.Less
This chapter considers the period in which the careers of MacNeice and W.B. Yeats overlapped. It highlights how Yeats was a contemporary as well as a precursor for MacNeice during the 1930s, a shift in perspective that reveals the dynamic nature of the two poets’ interaction. Yeats’s critical responses placed the younger poet outside of an Irish poetic—part of a dialectical move in Yeats’s activities of the period, as under pressure in the political present and with an eye to different publics and posterities, he set at odds aspects of his own poetic legacy. MacNeice, meanwhile, is shown as being deeply engaged with Yeats’s poetry from the earliest stages of his career. He both questioned and used aspects of Yeats’s achievement in the context of his own developing poetic, and his wider ambivalence about Ireland and its literary mores.
Michael Wood
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199557660
- eISBN:
- 9780191701726
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199557660.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
The Platonic Year, or the Great Year, is a traditional name for the period in which all the planets and fixed stars complete a cycle and return to a configuration they have occupied before, some ...
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The Platonic Year, or the Great Year, is a traditional name for the period in which all the planets and fixed stars complete a cycle and return to a configuration they have occupied before, some 26,000 years according to the calculation Yeats is using — his instructors, he said, meaning the spirits who spoke to him through his wife, ‘have … adopted the twenty-six thousand years of modern astronomy instead of the thirty-six thousand years Spenser [in The Faerie Queene] took from the Platonic Year’. This Year could be divided into twelve ‘months’ that became for Yeats the spells of two thousand plus years between catastrophic historical incarnations. Such a month would in turn have its months, and every division, including what we ordinarily call a calendar year, would have its seasons and phases of the moon, and would allow us to think, at the most immediate level, of what Yeats calls a ‘symbolical or ideal year’, incredibly long or reasonably short, ‘each month a brightening and a darkening fortnight, and at the same time perhaps a year with its four seasons’. The pattern runs all the way through the different levels and dimensions, and it's easy to see how the Platonic Year could become for Yeats an emblem of remote but undeniable regularity, and a figure for whatever there is that ultimately, however belatedly and at whatever cost, refutes randomness and asserts the enduring principle of order, or perhaps simply of the possibility of such a principle.Less
The Platonic Year, or the Great Year, is a traditional name for the period in which all the planets and fixed stars complete a cycle and return to a configuration they have occupied before, some 26,000 years according to the calculation Yeats is using — his instructors, he said, meaning the spirits who spoke to him through his wife, ‘have … adopted the twenty-six thousand years of modern astronomy instead of the thirty-six thousand years Spenser [in The Faerie Queene] took from the Platonic Year’. This Year could be divided into twelve ‘months’ that became for Yeats the spells of two thousand plus years between catastrophic historical incarnations. Such a month would in turn have its months, and every division, including what we ordinarily call a calendar year, would have its seasons and phases of the moon, and would allow us to think, at the most immediate level, of what Yeats calls a ‘symbolical or ideal year’, incredibly long or reasonably short, ‘each month a brightening and a darkening fortnight, and at the same time perhaps a year with its four seasons’. The pattern runs all the way through the different levels and dimensions, and it's easy to see how the Platonic Year could become for Yeats an emblem of remote but undeniable regularity, and a figure for whatever there is that ultimately, however belatedly and at whatever cost, refutes randomness and asserts the enduring principle of order, or perhaps simply of the possibility of such a principle.
