W.B. Yeats

Description

This collection of specially commissioned essays, by both established and younger scholars, provides a fresh as well as authoritative view of the works of W.B. Yeats, a poet who is not just one of the great figures of Irish literature, but of world literature.

Interest in Yeats is continually growing, 70 years after his death. These essays offer a comprehensive series of readings, not only of the poems but also of the plays, and remain mindful of the daring thought and subtly innovative technique of a poet whose complex identity and changing political views cannot be summed up with easy labels. They also offer a survey of recent criticism, and reassess Yeats’ Protestant background, his interest in esoteric traditions, his orientalism, his chief philosophical affiliations, his concepts of gender, and the way we should look at his life, including his relationships with women.

This book will prove indispensable for anyone wishing to deepen their understanding of this extraordinary poet.

Table of Contents

List of Contributors
Acknowledgments
W.B. Yeats: A Chronology

1. Yeats in the Light of Recent Criticism
Edward Larrissy
2.W.B. Yeats: Biographical Reflections
Terence Brown
3. Early Yeats: ‘The Essences of Things’
Michael O’Neill
4. Yeats from In the Seven Woods (1904) to Responsibilities (1914)
Vicki Mahaffey and Joseph Valente
5. The Wild Swans at Coole and Michael Robartes and the Dancer: Gender, History and the Esoteric
Edward Larrissy
6. Later Poetry
Stephen Regan
7.W.B. Yeats as Dramatist
Michael McAteer
8. Yeats’s Thought
David Dwan
9. Yeats and Women, or, Yeats and Woman: An Introduction, and Some Conclusions
Anne Margaret Daniel
10. Yeats’s Influence
Steven Matthews
Select Bibliography
Index

About the Editor

Edward Larrissy is Professor of Poetry at Queen’s University, Belfast, where he is affiliated to the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry. He was a lecturer at the Yeats International Summer School in Sligo in 2007 and 2009. He is the author of, among other things, Yeats the Poet: The Measures of Difference.