Gould Warwick and Reeves Marjorie
- Published in print:
- 2001
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199242306
- eISBN:
- 9780191697081
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199242306.003.0010
- Subject:
- Religion, History of Christianity, Theology
Joachim of Fiore occupies a curious and unexplored place in the history of William Butler Yeats's central preoccupations and, indeed, beliefs. Yeats seems to have furthered his knowledge of Joachim ...
More
Joachim of Fiore occupies a curious and unexplored place in the history of William Butler Yeats's central preoccupations and, indeed, beliefs. Yeats seems to have furthered his knowledge of Joachim via the ‘theologian’ of the Irish movement, Lionel Johnson, who shared with him the fin de siècle fascination with antinomianism. Johnson not only translated Yeats's imitations of Joachimist doctrines into convincing Latin, but also served as the model for Yeats's Joachite hero Owen Aherne in the 1896 story ‘The Tables of the Law’. Yeats managed to reinterpret the ideas of the Eternal Evangel as he found them in the writings of Ernest Renan and his followers. The third status also became something of a personal metaphor or nexus of metaphors for the state of blessedness or momentary timelessness which Yeats thought about in his deepest religious poems. But his encounter with Joachimism needs to be filled in from the start if the extent to which Yeats accommodated Joachim to himself is to be demonstrated.Less
Joachim of Fiore occupies a curious and unexplored place in the history of William Butler Yeats's central preoccupations and, indeed, beliefs. Yeats seems to have furthered his knowledge of Joachim via the ‘theologian’ of the Irish movement, Lionel Johnson, who shared with him the fin de siècle fascination with antinomianism. Johnson not only translated Yeats's imitations of Joachimist doctrines into convincing Latin, but also served as the model for Yeats's Joachite hero Owen Aherne in the 1896 story ‘The Tables of the Law’. Yeats managed to reinterpret the ideas of the Eternal Evangel as he found them in the writings of Ernest Renan and his followers. The third status also became something of a personal metaphor or nexus of metaphors for the state of blessedness or momentary timelessness which Yeats thought about in his deepest religious poems. But his encounter with Joachimism needs to be filled in from the start if the extent to which Yeats accommodated Joachim to himself is to be demonstrated.
Oren Izenberg
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691144832
- eISBN:
- 9781400836529
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691144832.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter examines the philosophical origins and political urgencies of William Butler Yeats's demand for “perfection” and “completeness.” It begins with a discussion of Yeats's conception of ...
More
This chapter examines the philosophical origins and political urgencies of William Butler Yeats's demand for “perfection” and “completeness.” It begins with a discussion of Yeats's conception of extreme and paradoxical theories of poetic agency and why such an excessive account of poetic agency might have appeared necessary in his historical situation. It then considers Yeats's early and abiding commitment to the esoteric roots of symbolism and his late interest in eugenics, both of which addressed the local project of forging a counterfactual identity. It also shows how Yeats's poetry bridges the gap between the perfected Ireland he envisioned and the degraded one he conjured. The chapter concludes with an analysis of Yeats's explicit rebellion, not against his universalist notion of personhood, but against his own will to poetic mastery.Less
This chapter examines the philosophical origins and political urgencies of William Butler Yeats's demand for “perfection” and “completeness.” It begins with a discussion of Yeats's conception of extreme and paradoxical theories of poetic agency and why such an excessive account of poetic agency might have appeared necessary in his historical situation. It then considers Yeats's early and abiding commitment to the esoteric roots of symbolism and his late interest in eugenics, both of which addressed the local project of forging a counterfactual identity. It also shows how Yeats's poetry bridges the gap between the perfected Ireland he envisioned and the degraded one he conjured. The chapter concludes with an analysis of Yeats's explicit rebellion, not against his universalist notion of personhood, but against his own will to poetic mastery.
Sinéad Garrigan Mattar
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199268955
- eISBN:
- 9780191710148
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199268955.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
The literature of the Irish Revival of the 1890s should be seen as a hinge between the 19th and 20th centuries. Its authors appropriated the ‘primitive’ through the lenses of comparative ...
More
The literature of the Irish Revival of the 1890s should be seen as a hinge between the 19th and 20th centuries. Its authors appropriated the ‘primitive’ through the lenses of comparative anthropology, mythology, and colonial travel-writing, and actively strove to re-establish contact with primitive modes through ‘the study of mythology, anthropology, and psychoanalysis’. They were engaged in a complex and volitional primitivism, which became ‘modernist’ as it utilised the findings of social science. The works of William Butler Yeats, John Millington Synge, and Lady Gregory are all analysed as the product of such influences. However, this book also suggests that Celticism itself underwent a sea-change during the 19th century, recreating itself in academic circles as an anti-primitivist science known as Celtology. It was only a matter of time before Yeats and Synge, who read widely in the works of Celtology, would look to this new science to find alternatives to the primitivism of the Twilight.Less
The literature of the Irish Revival of the 1890s should be seen as a hinge between the 19th and 20th centuries. Its authors appropriated the ‘primitive’ through the lenses of comparative anthropology, mythology, and colonial travel-writing, and actively strove to re-establish contact with primitive modes through ‘the study of mythology, anthropology, and psychoanalysis’. They were engaged in a complex and volitional primitivism, which became ‘modernist’ as it utilised the findings of social science. The works of William Butler Yeats, John Millington Synge, and Lady Gregory are all analysed as the product of such influences. However, this book also suggests that Celticism itself underwent a sea-change during the 19th century, recreating itself in academic circles as an anti-primitivist science known as Celtology. It was only a matter of time before Yeats and Synge, who read widely in the works of Celtology, would look to this new science to find alternatives to the primitivism of the Twilight.
Oren Izenberg
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691144832
- eISBN:
- 9781400836529
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691144832.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This book explores a set of interdependent problems in the history, theory, and politics of recent Anglo-American poetry while offering a challenge and an alternative to a nearly unanimous ...
More
This book explores a set of interdependent problems in the history, theory, and politics of recent Anglo-American poetry while offering a challenge and an alternative to a nearly unanimous literary–historical consensus that divides poetry into two warring camps—post-Romantic and postmodern; symbolist and constructivist; traditionalist and avant-garde. The book advocates a shift of emphasis, from “poems” as objects or occasions for experience to “poetry” as an occasion for reestablishing or revealing the most basic unit of social life and for securing the most fundamental object of moral regard. The book considers Language poetry as well as the work of William Butler Yeats, George Oppen, and Frank O'Hara—poets who seek ways to make their poetic thinking yield accounts of personhood that are at once minimal and universal.Less
This book explores a set of interdependent problems in the history, theory, and politics of recent Anglo-American poetry while offering a challenge and an alternative to a nearly unanimous literary–historical consensus that divides poetry into two warring camps—post-Romantic and postmodern; symbolist and constructivist; traditionalist and avant-garde. The book advocates a shift of emphasis, from “poems” as objects or occasions for experience to “poetry” as an occasion for reestablishing or revealing the most basic unit of social life and for securing the most fundamental object of moral regard. The book considers Language poetry as well as the work of William Butler Yeats, George Oppen, and Frank O'Hara—poets who seek ways to make their poetic thinking yield accounts of personhood that are at once minimal and universal.
Sinéad Garrigan Mattar
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199268955
- eISBN:
- 9780191710148
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199268955.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
It is in his dramatic work that there is most evidence of William Butler Yeats's reading of comparative science. Given both Yeats's literary primitivism and his supernaturalism, it was inevitable ...
More
It is in his dramatic work that there is most evidence of William Butler Yeats's reading of comparative science. Given both Yeats's literary primitivism and his supernaturalism, it was inevitable that he should look to the religio-mythic origins of theatre when creating a drama in reaction against what he perceived as an over-modern stage. Yeats's very involvement in the theatre in Ireland was an extension of his interest in creating rituals for the ‘Castle of Heroes’ — an elite, occult centre in which ‘Celtic Mysteries’ would revive the ancient Irish gods of the earth. His ideal theatre was thus both an actual attempt to ‘bring again the Golden Age’ by reviving the ancient gods and heroes on the stage, and part of the ‘ritual of revolt’ of Celtic Ireland. The paradox of this ‘ritual of revolt’ is itself explained by the initiatory nature of the rituals with which Yeats worked and on which his theatre was to be based. This chapter looks at how the use of a collective experience in the theatre was related to Yeats's interest in occultism, mythology, and magic.Less
It is in his dramatic work that there is most evidence of William Butler Yeats's reading of comparative science. Given both Yeats's literary primitivism and his supernaturalism, it was inevitable that he should look to the religio-mythic origins of theatre when creating a drama in reaction against what he perceived as an over-modern stage. Yeats's very involvement in the theatre in Ireland was an extension of his interest in creating rituals for the ‘Castle of Heroes’ — an elite, occult centre in which ‘Celtic Mysteries’ would revive the ancient Irish gods of the earth. His ideal theatre was thus both an actual attempt to ‘bring again the Golden Age’ by reviving the ancient gods and heroes on the stage, and part of the ‘ritual of revolt’ of Celtic Ireland. The paradox of this ‘ritual of revolt’ is itself explained by the initiatory nature of the rituals with which Yeats worked and on which his theatre was to be based. This chapter looks at how the use of a collective experience in the theatre was related to Yeats's interest in occultism, mythology, and magic.
PETER McDONALD
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199235803
- eISBN:
- 9780191714542
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199235803.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
The registers of regretful memory, or retrospective doubt and qualm, are central to William Butler Yeats's best poetry. These registers find their focus in his poetic vocabulary with the word ...
More
The registers of regretful memory, or retrospective doubt and qualm, are central to William Butler Yeats's best poetry. These registers find their focus in his poetic vocabulary with the word ‘remorse’, a term which denotes something more than regret, though also one which suggests significance other than the purely occasional or personal for that regret. For Yeats, remorse exists in the most intimate relation to the poetic impulse, and happens even in the textures of the poetry itself. At the same time, remorse is a force against which the poetry exerts its own rhetorical counter-pressures. This chapter examines how Yeats expresses remorse in his poems, John Quinn's criticism of Yeats's alleged failure to ‘make himself over’ in relation to World War I, and Yeats's rejection of Sean O'Casey's play The Silver Tassie for the Abbey Theatre. Yeats's poem Reprisals, which follows a remorseless rhetorical course, is also discussed.Less
The registers of regretful memory, or retrospective doubt and qualm, are central to William Butler Yeats's best poetry. These registers find their focus in his poetic vocabulary with the word ‘remorse’, a term which denotes something more than regret, though also one which suggests significance other than the purely occasional or personal for that regret. For Yeats, remorse exists in the most intimate relation to the poetic impulse, and happens even in the textures of the poetry itself. At the same time, remorse is a force against which the poetry exerts its own rhetorical counter-pressures. This chapter examines how Yeats expresses remorse in his poems, John Quinn's criticism of Yeats's alleged failure to ‘make himself over’ in relation to World War I, and Yeats's rejection of Sean O'Casey's play The Silver Tassie for the Abbey Theatre. Yeats's poem Reprisals, which follows a remorseless rhetorical course, is also discussed.
Peter McDonald
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199235803
- eISBN:
- 9780191714542
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199235803.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
Do we want to read poetry, or just like having a few poets to talk about? The history of poetry in 20th-century Britain and Ireland is one which ends with the assimilation of successful poets into a ...
More
Do we want to read poetry, or just like having a few poets to talk about? The history of poetry in 20th-century Britain and Ireland is one which ends with the assimilation of successful poets into a media culture. It is also, however, another history, one of form and authority, in which certain poets found modes and pitches of resistance to the seeming inevitabilities of their times. In this history, it is the authority of poetry (and not the media-processed poet) which is at stake in the integrity of poetic form. This book offers a controversial reading of 20th-century British and Irish poetry centred on six figures, all of whom are critics as well as poets: William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Wystan Hugh Auden, Louis MacNeice, Seamus Heaney, and Geoffrey Hill. Yeats's centrality to 20th-century poetry — and the problem many poets and critics had, or still have, with that centrality — is a major focus of the book. The book argues that it is in the strengths, possibilities, perplexities, and certainties of the poetic form that poetry's authority in a distrustful cultural climate remains most seriously alive.Less
Do we want to read poetry, or just like having a few poets to talk about? The history of poetry in 20th-century Britain and Ireland is one which ends with the assimilation of successful poets into a media culture. It is also, however, another history, one of form and authority, in which certain poets found modes and pitches of resistance to the seeming inevitabilities of their times. In this history, it is the authority of poetry (and not the media-processed poet) which is at stake in the integrity of poetic form. This book offers a controversial reading of 20th-century British and Irish poetry centred on six figures, all of whom are critics as well as poets: William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Wystan Hugh Auden, Louis MacNeice, Seamus Heaney, and Geoffrey Hill. Yeats's centrality to 20th-century poetry — and the problem many poets and critics had, or still have, with that centrality — is a major focus of the book. The book argues that it is in the strengths, possibilities, perplexities, and certainties of the poetic form that poetry's authority in a distrustful cultural climate remains most seriously alive.
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 ...
More
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.
Sarah Cole
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- January 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780195389616
- eISBN:
- 9780199979226
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195389616.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This chapter takes as its scope the substantial canon of Irish literature in the first decades of the twentieth century that engaged intimately with violence. It argues that the expression of ...
More
This chapter takes as its scope the substantial canon of Irish literature in the first decades of the twentieth century that engaged intimately with violence. It argues that the expression of violence can be understood according to four categories, each of which the chapter develops with respect to a host of writers, whose styles and political positions are widely divergent. The categories are not entirely parallel in structure, but together provide a capacious picture of the language of violence in the period: keening (or ritual lamentation), generative violence (the mode of the Rising), reprisal (the dark doppelganger of generativity), and allegory (in which the nation or body is likened to a tree or building). In tracing these four modes, the chapter invites a loosening of the ordinary political binaries that characterize criticism of this period. Prominent figures include, for keening, Synge and O'Casey; for generative violence, Synge, Yeats, Pearse, and other leaders of the Rising such as Plunkett and MacDonough; for reprisal, Mitchel, Yeats, Synge, and O'Casey; and for allegory, Yeats. Ultimately, the chapter charts an entirely new scheme for reading the violence canon in this period, attuned to the historical shifts eventuated by uprising, war and the institution of the nation state.Less
This chapter takes as its scope the substantial canon of Irish literature in the first decades of the twentieth century that engaged intimately with violence. It argues that the expression of violence can be understood according to four categories, each of which the chapter develops with respect to a host of writers, whose styles and political positions are widely divergent. The categories are not entirely parallel in structure, but together provide a capacious picture of the language of violence in the period: keening (or ritual lamentation), generative violence (the mode of the Rising), reprisal (the dark doppelganger of generativity), and allegory (in which the nation or body is likened to a tree or building). In tracing these four modes, the chapter invites a loosening of the ordinary political binaries that characterize criticism of this period. Prominent figures include, for keening, Synge and O'Casey; for generative violence, Synge, Yeats, Pearse, and other leaders of the Rising such as Plunkett and MacDonough; for reprisal, Mitchel, Yeats, Synge, and O'Casey; and for allegory, Yeats. Ultimately, the chapter charts an entirely new scheme for reading the violence canon in this period, attuned to the historical shifts eventuated by uprising, war and the institution of the nation state.
Helen O’connell
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199286461
- eISBN:
- 9780191713361
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199286461.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism, European Literature
Young Ireland rhetoric dominated Irish cultural institutions from the 1840s through to the Revival period. In the early 1890s, a young William Butler Yeats was embarking on his project to instil ...
More
Young Ireland rhetoric dominated Irish cultural institutions from the 1840s through to the Revival period. In the early 1890s, a young William Butler Yeats was embarking on his project to instil aesthetic revivalism in Ireland, a project that was, in part, a response to the rationalizing ideologies of improvement modernization. For Yeats, those ideologies were literary as well as social and political in nature, achieving their most coherent expression in the 19th-century tradition of English realism. This chapter explores how Yeats's Revival was directed against those discourses of progress, counteracting realist assertions of linearity and causality with supernaturalism and ‘orality’. It is thus unsurprising that Yeats was to find himself at odds with the Young Ireland orthodoxies of the period. This chapter speculates that the Revival writings of Yeats, Douglas Hyde, and J.M. Synge were a product of the inevitable failures of both improvement discourse and Young Ireland nationalism.Less
Young Ireland rhetoric dominated Irish cultural institutions from the 1840s through to the Revival period. In the early 1890s, a young William Butler Yeats was embarking on his project to instil aesthetic revivalism in Ireland, a project that was, in part, a response to the rationalizing ideologies of improvement modernization. For Yeats, those ideologies were literary as well as social and political in nature, achieving their most coherent expression in the 19th-century tradition of English realism. This chapter explores how Yeats's Revival was directed against those discourses of progress, counteracting realist assertions of linearity and causality with supernaturalism and ‘orality’. It is thus unsurprising that Yeats was to find himself at odds with the Young Ireland orthodoxies of the period. This chapter speculates that the Revival writings of Yeats, Douglas Hyde, and J.M. Synge were a product of the inevitable failures of both improvement discourse and Young Ireland nationalism.
PETER McDONALD
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199235803
- eISBN:
- 9780191714542
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199235803.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
William Butler Yeats operates often by manipulating parallels between the notion of memory — of historical and personal versions of the past, and of posterities and perpetuities — and the workings in ...
More
William Butler Yeats operates often by manipulating parallels between the notion of memory — of historical and personal versions of the past, and of posterities and perpetuities — and the workings in poetic structure in readers' memory in the returns and anticipations of rhyme, in the suspensions and resolutions of syntax, and in the larger recurrence of poems and parts of poems as the sounds of any reader's poetic knowledge. Yeats's poetic structures are evident in his poem Coole Park, 1929, whereby he commends his patroness to a posterity more enduring than that of her house. The ways in which Yeats's poems envisage or anticipate ruin are partly imitated in his poems' forms, but partly too they are undermined or questioned by the ways in which the forms cohere to provide a site on which the reader can be instructed to ‘take your stand’.Less
William Butler Yeats operates often by manipulating parallels between the notion of memory — of historical and personal versions of the past, and of posterities and perpetuities — and the workings in poetic structure in readers' memory in the returns and anticipations of rhyme, in the suspensions and resolutions of syntax, and in the larger recurrence of poems and parts of poems as the sounds of any reader's poetic knowledge. Yeats's poetic structures are evident in his poem Coole Park, 1929, whereby he commends his patroness to a posterity more enduring than that of her house. The ways in which Yeats's poems envisage or anticipate ruin are partly imitated in his poems' forms, but partly too they are undermined or questioned by the ways in which the forms cohere to provide a site on which the reader can be instructed to ‘take your stand’.
PETER McDONALD
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199235803
- eISBN:
- 9780191714542
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199235803.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
The name of William Butler Yeats means a number of different things in the discourses of contemporary Irish literary criticism, some of them a very long way from what might be understood by ...
More
The name of William Butler Yeats means a number of different things in the discourses of contemporary Irish literary criticism, some of them a very long way from what might be understood by admiration. The recognition that the forms of poetry can have something to do with other aspects of its literary significance needs to be made by any intelligent critical writing; but a crude version of such an awareness, in which poetic form becomes simply a cypher for ideological content or historical placing, is a danger attendant on some of the more spirited and committed contributions to Irish critical debate on Yeats. The question of form in contemporary theory has a special relevance for Northern Irish poetry since the early 1960s. This chapter also looks at Yeats's critical quarrel with Northern Irish poets such as Michael Longley and Paul Muldoon.Less
The name of William Butler Yeats means a number of different things in the discourses of contemporary Irish literary criticism, some of them a very long way from what might be understood by admiration. The recognition that the forms of poetry can have something to do with other aspects of its literary significance needs to be made by any intelligent critical writing; but a crude version of such an awareness, in which poetic form becomes simply a cypher for ideological content or historical placing, is a danger attendant on some of the more spirited and committed contributions to Irish critical debate on Yeats. The question of form in contemporary theory has a special relevance for Northern Irish poetry since the early 1960s. This chapter also looks at Yeats's critical quarrel with Northern Irish poets such as Michael Longley and Paul Muldoon.
Vivian Mercier
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198217527
- eISBN:
- 9780191678240
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198217527.003.0018
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Modern History
The rubric ‘literature and society’, which seems irrelevant to much of the literary work produced in the period 1891–1921, comes into its own from 1922 onwards. Whereas the plays of William Butler ...
More
The rubric ‘literature and society’, which seems irrelevant to much of the literary work produced in the period 1891–1921, comes into its own from 1922 onwards. Whereas the plays of William Butler Yeats, J. M. Synge, Lady Gregory, and George Fitzmaurice — compounded of myth, folklore, and fantasy — had formerly dominated the Irish theatre, the prose realism that had certainly also been a part of the Abbey tradition in the works of William Boyle, Padraic Colum, T. C. Murray, Seumas O'Kelly, and Lennox Robinson now began to drive fantasy and verse from the Abbey stage. Irish drama became a more faithful reflection of contemporary Irish society. There has been a growing tendency in Ireland, north and south, for the arts to receive assistance from business and finance. Literature benefits through prizes offered for drama, fiction, and poetry; summer schools and international conferences often receive subsidies.Less
The rubric ‘literature and society’, which seems irrelevant to much of the literary work produced in the period 1891–1921, comes into its own from 1922 onwards. Whereas the plays of William Butler Yeats, J. M. Synge, Lady Gregory, and George Fitzmaurice — compounded of myth, folklore, and fantasy — had formerly dominated the Irish theatre, the prose realism that had certainly also been a part of the Abbey tradition in the works of William Boyle, Padraic Colum, T. C. Murray, Seumas O'Kelly, and Lennox Robinson now began to drive fantasy and verse from the Abbey stage. Irish drama became a more faithful reflection of contemporary Irish society. There has been a growing tendency in Ireland, north and south, for the arts to receive assistance from business and finance. Literature benefits through prizes offered for drama, fiction, and poetry; summer schools and international conferences often receive subsidies.
Sinéad Garrigan Mattar
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199268955
- eISBN:
- 9780191710148
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199268955.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This book examines the work of the first three directors of the Abbey Theatre — William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory, and John Millington Synge — and in each case suggests the nature of their personal ...
More
This book examines the work of the first three directors of the Abbey Theatre — William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory, and John Millington Synge — and in each case suggests the nature of their personal primitivism and the extent to which it was influenced by comparative science. It discusses how critics ignored the existence of Celtology — the scientific, comparative study of Celtic culture, language, and literature that developed in the 1870s — and too often analysed the Celticism, and thus the primitivism, of the Irish Revival only in terms of the romantically primitivist tradition vocalised by both Ernest Renan and Matthew Arnold. One of the reasons why the primitivism of the Irish Revival has as yet received scant attention is that a vital distinction between primitivism and ‘archaism’ has been smudged by its most eminent critics.Less
This book examines the work of the first three directors of the Abbey Theatre — William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory, and John Millington Synge — and in each case suggests the nature of their personal primitivism and the extent to which it was influenced by comparative science. It discusses how critics ignored the existence of Celtology — the scientific, comparative study of Celtic culture, language, and literature that developed in the 1870s — and too often analysed the Celticism, and thus the primitivism, of the Irish Revival only in terms of the romantically primitivist tradition vocalised by both Ernest Renan and Matthew Arnold. One of the reasons why the primitivism of the Irish Revival has as yet received scant attention is that a vital distinction between primitivism and ‘archaism’ has been smudged by its most eminent critics.
Clare Hutton (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- March 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780199249114
- eISBN:
- 9780191803383
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199249114.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This chapter examines the range of publishing possibilities available to authors in Ireland in the years between 1891 and 1922. It begins with an overview of market conditions that affected the ...
More
This chapter examines the range of publishing possibilities available to authors in Ireland in the years between 1891 and 1922. It begins with an overview of market conditions that affected the development of Irish printing and publishing and compares them with those in Britain. It then considers the level of support given by British publishers to Irish authors, particularly William Butler Yeats and Douglas Hyde. It also analyses the revival of Irish publishing in Dublin which coincided with the cultural revival of the period.Less
This chapter examines the range of publishing possibilities available to authors in Ireland in the years between 1891 and 1922. It begins with an overview of market conditions that affected the development of Irish printing and publishing and compares them with those in Britain. It then considers the level of support given by British publishers to Irish authors, particularly William Butler Yeats and Douglas Hyde. It also analyses the revival of Irish publishing in Dublin which coincided with the cultural revival of the period.
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9781846318238
- eISBN:
- 9781846317705
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/UPO9781846317705.004
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter analyses the allusive technique used by James Joyce in writing Dubliners. It identifies a number of previously unconsidered texts that lie submerged in the stories and considers what ...
More
This chapter analyses the allusive technique used by James Joyce in writing Dubliners. It identifies a number of previously unconsidered texts that lie submerged in the stories and considers what they might tell us about Joyce's attitudes towards literary revival and to Ireland's tragic history. The chapter also highlights the phantom presence of several other authors in Dubliners including William Butler Yeats, Alfred Perceval Graves, William Rooney and Ethna Carbery.Less
This chapter analyses the allusive technique used by James Joyce in writing Dubliners. It identifies a number of previously unconsidered texts that lie submerged in the stories and considers what they might tell us about Joyce's attitudes towards literary revival and to Ireland's tragic history. The chapter also highlights the phantom presence of several other authors in Dubliners including William Butler Yeats, Alfred Perceval Graves, William Rooney and Ethna Carbery.
Willard Spiegelman
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195332926
- eISBN:
- 9780199851294
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195332926.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
Although readers of prose fiction sometimes find descriptive passages superfluous or boring, description itself is often the most important aspect of a poem. This book examines how a variety of ...
More
Although readers of prose fiction sometimes find descriptive passages superfluous or boring, description itself is often the most important aspect of a poem. This book examines how a variety of contemporary poets use description in their work. Description has been the great burden of poetry. How do poets see the world? How do they look at it? What do they look for? Is description an end in itself, or a means of expressing desire? Ezra Pound demanded that a poem should represent the external world as objectively and directly as possible, and William Butler Yeats, in his introduction to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936), said that he and his generation were rebelling against, inter alia, “irrelevant descriptions of nature” in the work of their predecessors. The poets in this book, however, who are distinct in many ways from one another, all observe the external world of nature or the reflected world of art and make relevant poems out of their observations.Less
Although readers of prose fiction sometimes find descriptive passages superfluous or boring, description itself is often the most important aspect of a poem. This book examines how a variety of contemporary poets use description in their work. Description has been the great burden of poetry. How do poets see the world? How do they look at it? What do they look for? Is description an end in itself, or a means of expressing desire? Ezra Pound demanded that a poem should represent the external world as objectively and directly as possible, and William Butler Yeats, in his introduction to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936), said that he and his generation were rebelling against, inter alia, “irrelevant descriptions of nature” in the work of their predecessors. The poets in this book, however, who are distinct in many ways from one another, all observe the external world of nature or the reflected world of art and make relevant poems out of their observations.
Jr. John Burt Foster
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- August 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780262014571
- eISBN:
- 9780262289672
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- The MIT Press
- DOI:
- 10.7551/mitpress/9780262014571.003.0015
- Subject:
- Neuroscience, Research and Theory
This chapter considers a range of specimen passages, written in the early and mid-twentieth century, from memoirs by poet and playwright William Butler Yeats and by novelists Vladimir Nabokov and ...
More
This chapter considers a range of specimen passages, written in the early and mid-twentieth century, from memoirs by poet and playwright William Butler Yeats and by novelists Vladimir Nabokov and Mary McCarthy. All three were gifted writers who became fascinated with memoir writing, not only to record a variety of vivid and important memories, but also to revisit and refine them later on. The literary memoir focuses with intensity on its author's capacity to remember, making it fertile ground for evaluating the nature and accuracy of long-term personal memory over periods of time that far exceed those of typical psychology experiments. The passages presented in this chapter raise questions about the outer limits of human memory and about its interaction, fusion, or confusion with creativity and imagination.Less
This chapter considers a range of specimen passages, written in the early and mid-twentieth century, from memoirs by poet and playwright William Butler Yeats and by novelists Vladimir Nabokov and Mary McCarthy. All three were gifted writers who became fascinated with memoir writing, not only to record a variety of vivid and important memories, but also to revisit and refine them later on. The literary memoir focuses with intensity on its author's capacity to remember, making it fertile ground for evaluating the nature and accuracy of long-term personal memory over periods of time that far exceed those of typical psychology experiments. The passages presented in this chapter raise questions about the outer limits of human memory and about its interaction, fusion, or confusion with creativity and imagination.
Sarah Cole
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- January 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780195389616
- eISBN:
- 9780199979226
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195389616.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
Taking as its touchstone the passage from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man when young Stephen Dedalus is beaten on the hands, the introduction establishes key principles for reading violence ...
More
Taking as its touchstone the passage from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man when young Stephen Dedalus is beaten on the hands, the introduction establishes key principles for reading violence in modernist literature: violence is imagined as the site of multiple origins and primary subjectivity; it is located in the body and at the crux of culture; it often begins as allegory (for instance by suggesting violence against humans through representations of violence against animals) yet it also collapses allegory into incarnation; most generally, the effort to find literary forms for violence stands at the very crux of literary self-definition. The introduction amplifies key terms in the book such as force and political violence, and develops two poles of historical thinking about violence in the period, the spectacular (where violence is hyperbolic and intensely visual, as in WWI) and the hidden (where violence remains mute and effaced). It also clarifies the book's relation to several important critical conventions about WWI and modernism, and provides brief chapter summaries.Less
Taking as its touchstone the passage from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man when young Stephen Dedalus is beaten on the hands, the introduction establishes key principles for reading violence in modernist literature: violence is imagined as the site of multiple origins and primary subjectivity; it is located in the body and at the crux of culture; it often begins as allegory (for instance by suggesting violence against humans through representations of violence against animals) yet it also collapses allegory into incarnation; most generally, the effort to find literary forms for violence stands at the very crux of literary self-definition. The introduction amplifies key terms in the book such as force and political violence, and develops two poles of historical thinking about violence in the period, the spectacular (where violence is hyperbolic and intensely visual, as in WWI) and the hidden (where violence remains mute and effaced). It also clarifies the book's relation to several important critical conventions about WWI and modernism, and provides brief chapter summaries.
Patrick R. O’Malley
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- April 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780198790419
- eISBN:
- 9780191831669
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198790419.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism, European Literature
This chapter argues that both Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the works of William Butler Yeats take up the problem of literary historiography and historical violence in an era which was moving questions ...
More
This chapter argues that both Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the works of William Butler Yeats take up the problem of literary historiography and historical violence in an era which was moving questions of Irish nationalist historiography into the political sphere as Home Rule or independence came to the fore as a concept and a goal. It suggests that Irish modernism’s diminished sense of the transformative potential of an authentically historical literature parallels the shift of the rhetorics of historical memory to the arena of the new state, in both parliamentary discourse and the construction of an urban architecture of memorialization.Less
This chapter argues that both Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the works of William Butler Yeats take up the problem of literary historiography and historical violence in an era which was moving questions of Irish nationalist historiography into the political sphere as Home Rule or independence came to the fore as a concept and a goal. It suggests that Irish modernism’s diminished sense of the transformative potential of an authentically historical literature parallels the shift of the rhetorics of historical memory to the arena of the new state, in both parliamentary discourse and the construction of an urban architecture of memorialization.
