William Butler Yeats(1865-1939)

A selective list of online literary criticism for the British poet William Butler Yeats, favoring signed articles by recognized scholars, articles published in reviewed sources, and web sites that adhere to the MLA Guidelines for Web Pages.

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Literary criticism

Chaudhry, Yug Mohit. Publisher's blurb for Yeats: The Irish Literary Revival and the Politics of Print. "Examines the relationship between Yeats, Irish literary nationalism and the publishing industry during the Irish Literary Revival in the late Nineteenth Century" (Cork Univ. Press, 2001).

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, " extended discussion of this theme, especially in connection with the Crazy Jane poems. The London Magazine, Vol 1 No 9 (December 1961).

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." In The Chronicle of Higher Education (21 November 1997) (removed).

Edmond, Murray. "No Paragraphs: Meditations on Noh, Poetry, Theatre and the Avant-garde." On W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and other poets, in the ever-interesting Jacket Magazine. Jacket 16 March 2002.

Flanagan, Thomas. "Yeats, Joyce, and the Matter of Ireland." First page of article only. Critical Inquiry, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Autumn, 1975), pp. 43-67.

Foster, R.F. A review of W B Yeats: A Life, vol. 1, The Apprentice Mage In The New Statesman, March 21, 1997 by Patricia Craig (removed). Another review in Contemporary Review, Dec, 1997 by Geoffrey Heptonstall.

Foster, R.F. A review of W B Yeats: A Life, vol. II: The Arch-poet (Oxford University Press). "The second coming: Ireland still lives in the shadow of W B Yeats. At times, the shadow darkens and changes its shape, but it is never absent, because his search for freedom and soaring autonomy makes him our contemporary. In The New Statesman, Oct 27, 2003 by Colm Toibin (removed). Another review in Contemporary Review, June, 2004 by Edward Bradbury.

Frazier, Adrian. Behind the Scenes: Yeats, Horniman, and the Struggle for the Abbey Theatre (University of California Press, 1990). A complete, book-length critical study, courtesy of the California Digital Library.

Hammer, Langdon. "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." Yale Univ., English 310, Spring 2007, Open Courseware, transcript. For the audio or video version.

Hammer, Langdon. "Yeats's middle period is explored, beginning with the middle-aged Yeats's assumption of the role of spokesman for Irish nationalism and the development of his complicated response to nationalist violence. The aestheticization of violence is considered in the poem 'Easter, 1916' and briefly in 'The Statues.' Yeats's conception of the relationship of violence to history, with particular emphasis on the frightening interaction among the divine, the human, and the bestial, is demonstrated in the visionary poems 'The Second Coming' and 'The Magi,' and finally in 'Leda and the Swan.'" Yale Univ., English 310, Spring 2007, Open Courseware, transcript. For the audio or video version.

Hammer, Langdon. "Yeats's late poetry is discussed and interpreted. The poet's interest in human knowledge and its relationship to the body, particularly the aging body, is traced from 'Leda and the Swan' to 'Sailing to Byzantium,' 'In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markievicz,' 'Two Songs from a Play,' and 'Vacillation.' Yeats's late interest in the experiences of joy, madness, and 'gaiety' is examined in 'Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop.' Yeats's de-mystifying attitude toward art in 'The Circus Animals' Desertion' is contrasted with his celebration of art in 'Lapis Lazuli.'" Yale Univ., English 310, Spring 2007, Open Courseware, transcript. For the audio or video version.

Heptonstall, Geoffrey. A review of W.B. Yeats: The Man and the Milieu, Contemporary Review, Dec, 1997.

Hyde, Virginia. "D. H. Lawrence, W. B. Yeats, and the Rosa Mundi," The South Carolina Review, 69.

Kelly, John and Eric Domville (eds.) A review of The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, Volume I, 1865-1895, (Oxford) In National Review, August 15, 1986. Reviewed by Jeffrey Meyers.

Longenbach, James. Publisher's blurb for Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats, and Modernism (Oxford, 1991).

McDonald, Russell. "Who Speaks For Fergus? Silence, Homophobia, and the Anxiety of Yeatsian Influence in Joyce [James Joyce, W.B. Yeats]. Twentieth Century Literature, 12/22/05.

McKinsey, Martin. "Classicism and Colonial Retrenchment in W. B. Yeats's 'No Second Troy.'" First page of article only. Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 48, No. 2 (Summer, 2002), pp. 174-190.

Mills, Margaret. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, vol. 12: John Sherman and Dhoya. On two early short stories by Yeats. In Studies in Short Fiction, Wntr, 1993.

Moses, Michael Valdez. "The Poet As Politician new biography of W.B. Yeats examines broader context of poet's life," in Reason, Feb, 2001.

Perloff, Marjorie. "'Easter 1916': Yeats's World War I Poem." From The Oxford Handbook of British and Irish War Poetry, ed. Tim Kendall. On the emotional and political complexity that generated, and found expression in, the poem.

Ramazani, Jahan. "'A little space': the psychic economy of Yeats' love poems." Criticism, Wntr, 1993.

Vendler, Helen. Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form (Harvard Univ. Press, 2007), publisher's web site. Includes an interview with Professor Vendler. A review, in the NY Sun, by Sam Munson, 12/12/07.

Vendler, Helen. An analysis of Yeats' "Among School Children." A video presentation from Professor Helen Vendler's Harvard class "Poems, Poets, Poetry.".

Witt, Marion. "The Making of an Elegy: Yeats's 'In Memory of Major Robert Gregory.'" First page of article only. Modern Philology, Vol. 48, No. 2 (Nov., 1950), pp. 112-121.

Wood, Andelys. "Yeats and Measurement." First page of article only. South Atlantic Review, Vol. 50, No. 4 (Nov., 1985), pp. 65-79.

Introductory, overview, lighter reading

A web site for "Easter 1916" from the educational publisher Norton, includes the text of the poem, a few annotations, discussion and analysis, brief essays on the historical context, some manuscript facsimiles, and more. A good introduction to the poem.

"'Who Goes with Fergus?': The Transfiguration of Yeats in [James Joyce's] Ulysses." From Debora Sherman's class in Modern Irish Literature at Haverford College.

Alkali-Gut, Karen. Selected Poems of Yeats: An Introduction, covers Yeats' early experiences and Pre-Raphaelitism. From Hakibbutz Hameuchad edition of Yeats' Poems, 2001.

Brewer, Elizabeth. "William Butler Yeats and Postcolonialism." Yeats, as a writer who devoted himself to Irish culture and literature, could be considered a postcolonial figure, this essay contends. From the postcolonial literature project at Emory Univ.

Cusack, George. Introduction to Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902),in the Literary Encyclopedia, 25 November 2004.

McDonald, Peter. "Yeats's Ghosts." On Early Poems and Stories, which appeared in 1925 and brought together The Celtic Twilight (1893) and The Secret Rose (1897). Times Literary Supplement, 4/19/06.

Spurr, Barry. A substantial introduction to W.B. Yeats, from the Literary Encyclopedia, August 2005.

"W.B. Yeats: A Reassessment." Information on the 2008 National Endowment for the Humanities Institute for College and University Teachers to be held in Galway, Dublin, and at the Yeats Summer School, Sligo from July 7th to August 1st, 2008.

The Yeats page maintained by the Nobel Prize web site contains a brief biography of Yeats and his 1923 Nobel prize acceptance speech.

"Mr Yeats's ardent new poems," a review from 1919 of "The Wild Swans at Coole," The Guardian archive.

Web page for the Yeats Society Sligo contains short articles on Yeats' career, poetry, and drama, with photos.

A very brief introduction to Yeats from the Academy of American Poets.

An appreciation of the yet-living William Butler Yeats written in 1938, by poet Louise Bogan in The Atlantic Monthly (removed).

An Atlantic Monthly review, by Seamus Heaney, of R. F. Foster's W. B. Yeats: A Life (removed).

Libraries, collections, manuscripts

From the National Library of Ireland, based on their acclaimed exhibition "The Life and Works of William Butler Yeats," an innovative online exhibition which recreates the museum experience and makes accessible an extensive collection of Yeats documents and other materials related to Irish literature, history, and culture.

'Such Friends: The Work of W.B. Yeats,' a special Yeats exhibition at the NY Public Library, June 1999. Commonweal, August 13, 1999 reviewed by Elizabeth Kirkland Cahill.

The Yeats manuscripts at the University of Indiana.

Yeats manuscript collection at Stony Brook University.

The Yeats collection at Queen's University, Ontario.

Description of Yeats resources at the University of Texas includes brief biography (removed).

W. B. Yeats Correspondence in the Lennox Robinson Collection at S. Illinois University (removed).

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