Yeats, William Butler

Yeats: The Man and the Masks

The definitive biography of William Butler Yeats. The most influential poet of his age, Yeats eluded the grasp of many who sought to explain him. In this classic critical examination of the poet, Richard Ellmann strips away the masks of his subject: occultist, senator of the Irish Free State, libidinous old man, and Nobel Prize winner.

Yeats (A Galaxy Book 378)

At once praised and condemned by his contemporaries and by critics ever since for his highly complex poetic vision, William Butler Yeats remains one of the most important and controversial twentieth-century poets. In what has become a classic work of literary criticism, award-winning critic Harold Bloom breaks new ground with his radical interpretation of Yeats' relationship to the English Romantic tradition. Yeats tells the continuous story of the lifelong influence of Shelley, Blake, and the Romantic tradition upon Yeats' work. Through his analysis of the full spectrum of Yeats' poems and plays, Bloom offers a profound reinterpretation of poetic influence in general.

W. B. Yeats: A Life Volume II: The Arch-Poet 1915-1939 (Wb Yeats a Life)

The first volume in Roy Foster's magisterial biography of W.B. Yeats was hailed as "a work of huge significance" (The Atlantic Monthly) and "a stupendous historiographical feat" (Irish Sunday Independent). Now, the eagerly awaited second volume explores the complex poetic, political, and personal intricacies of Yeats's dramatic final decades, a period that saw the Easter Rebellion, the founding of the Irish state in 1922, and the production of Yeats's greatest masterpieces.
In the conclusion of this first fully authorized biography, Foster brilliantly illuminates the circumstances--the rich internal and external experiences--that shaped the great poetry of Yeats's later years: "The Wild Swans at Coole," "Sailing to Byzantium," "The Tower," "The Circus Animals Desertion," "Under Ben Bulben," and many others. Yeats's pursuit of Irish nationalism and an independent Irish culture, his continued search for supernatural truths through occult experimentation, his extraordinary marriage, a series of tempestuous love affairs, and his lingering obsession with Maud Gonne are all explored here with a nuance and awareness rare in literary biography. Foster gives us the very texture of Yeats's life and thought, revealing the many ways he made poetry out of the "quarrel" with himself and the upheaval around him. But this consummate biography also shows that Yeats was much more than simply a lyric poet and examines in great detail Yeats's non-poetic work--his essays, plays, polemics, and memoirs. The enormous and varied circle of Yeats's friends, lovers, family, collaborators and antagonists inhabit and enrich a personal world of astounding energy, artistic commitment and verve; while the poet himself is shown returning again and again to his governing preoccupations, sex and death.
Based on complete and unprecedented access to Yeats's papers and written with extraordinary grace and insight, W.B. Yeats, A Life offers the fullest portrait yet of the private and public life of one of the twentieth century's greatest poets.

The Love Story of W.B. Yeats and Maud Gonne

A dramatic and compelling story of the great love of W. B. Yeats for Maud Gonne, the woman he immortalised in his poems. Set in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this romantic tale unfolds against a backdrop of political unrest and tenant agitation in Ireland. The poet W. B. Yeats was a central figure in the Irish literary revival while Maud Gonne, a political activist, was passionately involved in the struggle for Irish independence.

Autobiographies: The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Volume III (Collected Works of W B Yeats)

The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume III: Autobiographies is part of the fourteen-volume series overseen by eminent Yeats scholars Richard J. Finnerah and George Mills Harper. The series includes virtually all of the Nobel laureate's published work, with authoritative and explanatory notes.

Autobiographies consists of six autobiographical works -- Reveries Over Childhood and Youth, The Trembling of the Veil, Dramatis Personae, Estrangement, The Death of Synge, and The Bounty of Sweden -- that William Butler Yeats published together in the mid-1930s to form a single, extraordinary memoir of the first fifty-eight years of his life, from his earliest memories of childhood to winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. This volume provides a vivid series of personal accounts of a wide range of figures, and it describes Yeats's work as poet and playwright, as a founder of Dublin's famed Abbey Theatre, his involvement with Irish nationalism, and his fascination with occultism and visions. This book is most compelling as Yeats's own account of the growth of his poetic imagination. Yeats thought that a poet leads a life of allegory, and that his works are comments upon it. Autobiographies enacts his ruling belief in the connections and coherence between the life that he led and the works that he wrote. It is a vision of personal history as art, and so it is the one truly essential companion to his poems and plays.

Edited by William H. O'Donnell and Douglas N. Archibald, this volume is available for the first time with invaluable explanatory notes and includes previously unpublished passages from candidly explicit first drafts.

W. B. Yeats: A New Biography

Half a century ago, Norman Jeffares wrote the definitive biography of W.B. Yeats, which was subsequently published in a revised edition in 1990 to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the poet's death. The present volume, a re-issue of the 1990 edition with a new introduction and bibliography, is an account of Yeats's life and work, together with a fascinating collection of letters, photographs and poetry.

The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats: Consisting of Reveries over Childhood and Youth, The Trembling of the Veil and Dramatis Personae (A Collier Book, 05559)

The AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS (REISSUE)

W.B. Yeats Twentie Century Magus: An In-Depth Study of Yeat's Esoteric Practices and Beliefs, Including Excerpts from His Magical Diaries

W.B. Yeats--Twentieth Century Magus is a comprehensive study of his magical practices and beliefs. Yeats moved through many different phases of spiritual development, believing that his life was an intellectual, spiritual, and artistic quest--a quest greatly influenced by Celtic lore, Theosophy, Golden Dawn ceremonial magic, Swedenborg's metaphysics, the works of Jacob Boehme, and Neo-Platonism. For Yeats, writing poetry was an act of divine possession, and he believed that a perfected soul was the source of his inspiration, visiting him during times of superconscious awareness. Susan Johnston Graf meticulously documents and provides evidence that Yeat's poetry is brilliant, lyric narrative of realtiy captured through the mind of a practicing magician working in the Western Tradition.

Family Secrets: William Butler Yeats and His Relatives (Irish Studies)