William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
“. . . and gather me | Into the artiface of eternity . . . ”
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Frieze of the female martyrs, Sant' Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna. An inspiration for "Sailing to Byzantium," says Jon Stallworthy. Photo by Mary Ann Sullivan.
introduction
"William Butler Yeats." Poetry Archive. Directors, Andrew Motion & Richard Carrington.
"W. B. Yeats." A brief introduction to William Butler Yeats, includes text of many of his most famous poems, with Yeats himself reading "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" in one audio file. Academy of American Poets.
"William Butler Yeats." Yeats's biography, themes, style, his mysticism, and more, are covered in a reliable, encyclopedia-type article from the Poetry Foundation. Ed. Catherine Halley.
"Easter 1916." From the educational publisher Norton, the web page includes the text of the poem, its historical context, a few hypertext annotations, discussion and analysis, and some manuscript facsimiles.
Alkali-Gut, Karen. Selected Poems of Yeats: An Introduction, covers Yeats's early experiences and Pre-Raphaelitism. From Hakibbutz Hameuchad edition of Yeats's Poems, 2001.
"Mr Yeats's ardent new poems," a review from 1919 of "The Wild Swans at Coole." The (UK) Guardian archive.
Spurr, Barry. "W.B. Yeats." Literary Encyclopedia, 26 August 2005. Eds. Robert Clark, Emory Elliott, Janet Todd. An introduction to Yeats, from a database that provides signed literary criticism by experts in their field, and is available to individuals for a reasonably-priced subscription [subscription service].
Cusack, George. On Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902), Literary Encyclopedia, 25 November 2004.
literary criticism
Bloom, Edward A. "Yeats's 'Second Coming': An Experiment in Analysis." University of Kansas City Review 21, 2 (Winter 1954) [subscription service].
Bogan, Louise. "William Butler Yeats." An appreciation of the yet-living Yeats written in 1938, by poet Louise Bogan. The Atlantic Monthly.
Bradford, Curtis. "Yeats's Byzantium Poems: A Study of their Development," in Yeats: A Collection of Critical Essays. Prentice Hall, 1963. Questia [subscription service].
Cusack, George. The Politics of Identity in Irish Drama: W.B. Yeats, Augusta Gregory and J.M. Synge. Routledge, 2009. Publisher's site.
Doggett, Rob. "Writing out chaos: Constructions of history in Yeats's 'Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen' and 'Meditations in Time of Civil War.'" Twentieth Century Literature, Summer 2001.
Donoghue, Denis. "The Human Image in Yeats." "Reading Yeats we find a poet intensely and often painfully preoccupied with the irreconcilable claims of Soul and Body." An extended discussion of this theme, especially in the Crazy Jane poems. The London Magazine 1 (December 1961).
(removed) Donoghue, Denis. "Fears for Irish Studies in an Age of Identity Politics." Donoghue writes, "not only is postcolonial theory ill-suited to the Irish situation, but the interpretations of literature that it produces are shallow and one-dimensional." Chronicle of Higher Education 21 November 1997.
Edmond, Murray. "No Paragraphs: Meditations on Noh, Poetry, Theatre and the Avant-garde." On W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound. Jacket 16 (March 2002).
Foster, R.F. A review of W B Yeats: A Life, Vol. 1, The Apprentice Mage Contemporary Review Dec. 1997. Review by Geoffrey Heptonstall. Review of W B Yeats: A Life, Vol. II: The Arch-poet. Contemporary Review, June 2004. Review by Edward Bradbury.
Frazier, Adrian. Behind the Scenes: Yeats, Horniman, and the Struggle for the Abbey Theatre (U of California P 1990). A free, book-length critical study. California Digital Library.
Hammer, Langdon. ENGL 310: Modern Poetry, William Butler Yeats. In the first of two lectures on Yeats, "The early poetry of William Butler Yeats is read and interpreted with particular attention paid to Yeats's ambitions as a specifically Irish poet. Yeats's commitment to a poetry of symbol is explored in 'The Song of the Wandering Aengus,' a fable of poetic vocation. 'A Coat,' composed at the end of Yeats's struggle to bring about an Irish national theater, shows the poet reconceiving his style and in search of a new audience. 'The Fisherman' is read as a revision of 'The Song of the Wandering Aengus' which reflects this new set of concerns" [2 lectures]. Yale U Open Courseware Spring 2007.
Harrison, John R. "What Rough Beast?: Yeats, Nietzsche and Historical Rhetoric in 'The Second Coming'." Papers on Language and Literature 31, 4 (Fall 1995) [first half of article only].
Hart, Stephen. "Paradigms of Peripheral Modernity in Lorca and Yeats." Modern Language Review 102 (April 2007).
Heptonstall, Geoffrey. A review of W.B. Yeats: The Man and the Milieu. In Contemporary Review Dec. 1997.
Jeffares, Norman A., ed. The Critical Heritage: W.B. Yeats. Routledge, 1997. Publisher's site.
Jeffares, Norman A. A new commentary on the poems of W.B. Yeats, at Google Books.
Jeffares, Norman A. "The Byzantine Poems of W.B. Yeats." On "Sailing to Byzantium," "Byzantium," manuscripts. The Review of English Studies 85 (1946) [first page of article only].
Kermode, Frank. "The Anglo-Irish Hyphen." Kermode reflects on a passage in Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism (1993) on "Yeats and Decolonization." Hopkins Review Winter 2008 [first page of article only].
Levine, Bernard. "Vision and 'Responsibility.'" On "The Second Coming" and earlier Yeats poems. In The Dissolving Image: The Spiritual-Esthetic Development of W. B. Yeats (Wayne State UP 1970) [subscription service].
Longenbach, James. Publisher's blurb for Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats, and Modernism. Oxford UP, 1991.
McDonald, Russell. "Who Speaks For Fergus? Silence, Homophobia, and the Anxiety of Yeatsian Influence in Joyce. Twentieth Century Literature (2005) [and Joyce].
McKinsey, Martin. "Classicism and Colonial Retrenchment in W. B. Yeats's 'No Second Troy.'" Twentieth Century Literature 48 (Summer, 2002) [first page of article only].
Mills, Margaret. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, vol. 12: John Sherman and Dhoya. On two early short stories by Yeats. Studies in Short Fiction Winter 1993.
Moynahan, Julian. Anglo-Irish: the literary imagination in a hyphenated culture (Princeton UP 1995). Publisher's web site.
Moses, Michael Valdez. "The Poet As Politician, a new biography of W.B. Yeats examines broader context of poet's life." Reason Feb., 2001.
Perloff, Marjorie. "'Easter 1916': Yeats's World War I Poem." From The Oxford Handbook of British and Irish War Poetry. On the emotional and political complexity that generated and found expression in the poem.
Pocock, Stephanie J. "Artistic Liminality: Yeats's Cathleen ni Houlihan and Purgatory." New Hibernia Review Autumn 2008. [First page of article only.]
Pound, Ezra. "Responsibilities, by W.B. Yeats." Ezra Pound's review of Yeats in Poetry magazine, May 1914.
Ramazani, Jahan. "'A little space': the psychic economy of Yeats's love poems." Criticism Winter 1993.
Stallworthy, Jon. A review of Vision and Revision in Yeats's Last Poems, which continues Stallworthy's analysis of Yeats's manuscript development begun in Between the Lines. Review by Curtis Bradford. Modern Language Quarterly 31 (1970) [first page of article only].
Vance, Norman. "Decadence from Belfast to Byzantium." New Literary History 35 (Autumn 2004). [First page of article only.]
Vendler, Helen. "Among School Children." An analysis of Yeats's poem, in a video presentation from Professor Helen Vendler's Harvard class "Poems, Poets, Poetry."
Vendler, Helen. Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form )Harvard UP 2007). Publisher's web site. Includes an interview with Professor Vendler. A review by Sam Munson, in the NY Sun, 12 Dec. 2007.
"'Who Goes with Fergus?': The Transfiguration of Yeats in Ulysses" [and James Joyce]. From Debora Sherman's class in Modern Irish Literature at Haverford College.
web sites
"The Life and Works of William Butler Yeats." The National Library of Ireland. An online exhibition which makes accessible an extensive collection of Yeats documents, and other holdings on Irish literature, history, and culture.
Yeats Society Sligo. About the Society, the Yeats Summer School, News and Events.
Brewer, Elizabeth. "William Butler Yeats and Postcolonialism." Brewer contends that Yeats, as a writer who devoted himself to Irish culture and literature, could be considered a postcolonial figure. From the Postcolonial literature project at Emory U.
libraries & manuscripts
'Such Friends: The Work of W.B. Yeats.' On a special Yeats exhibition at the NY Public Library, June 1999. Commonweal, 13 Aug., 1999, reviewed by Elizabeth Kirkland Cahill.
The Yeats manuscripts at the U of Indiana.
Yeats manuscript collection at Stony Brook U.
The Yeats collection at Queen's University, Ontario.
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