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 Stallworthy. Photo by Mary Ann Sullivan.
Literary criticism
Bradford, Curtis. "Yeats's Byzantium Poems: A Study of their Development," in Yeats: A Collection of Critical Essays. Prentice Hall, 1963. Questia.
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." The London Magazine 1 (December 1961). [An extended discussion of this theme, especially in the Crazy Jane poems.]
Edmond, Murray. "No Paragraphs: Meditations on Noh, Poetry, Theatre and the Avant-garde." On W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and other poets. Jacket 16 (March 2002).
Foster, R.F. A review of W B Yeats: A Life, Vol. 1, The Apprentice Mage by R.F. Foster. The New Statesman 21 March, 1997. Review by Patricia Craig (removed). Another review. Contemporary Review, Dec., 1997. Review by Geoffrey Heptonstall.
Foster, R.F. A review of W B Yeats: A Life, Vol. II: The Arch-poet by R.F. Foster. "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." The New Statesman 27 Oct., 2003. Review by Colm Toibin (removed). Another review. 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 complete, book-length critical study. California Digital Library.
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. Contemporary Review, Dec., 1997.
Jeffares, Norman A., ed. The Critical Heritage: W.B. Yeats. Routledge, 1997. Publisher's site. Preview at Google Books.
Jeffares, Norman A. A new commentary on the poems of W.B. Yeats. Stanford UP.
Jeffares, Norman A. "The Byzantine Poems of W.B. Yeats." The Review of English Studies 85 (1946) [Sailing to Byzantium, Byzantium, manuscripts].
Kelly, John and Eric Domville (eds.) A review of The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, Volume I, 1865-1895. National Review 15 August, 1986. Reviewed by Jeffrey Meyers.
Kermode, Frank. "The Anglo-Irish Hyphen." Hopkins Review Winter 2008. Kermode reflects on a passage in Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism (1993) on "Yeats and Decolonization."
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) [James Joyce].
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.
Moses, Michael Valdez. "The Poet As Politician 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, ed. Tim Kendall. 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.
Pound, Ezra. "Responsibilities, by W.B. Yeats." Ezra Pound's review of Yeats in Poetry, May 1914.
Ramazani, Jahan. "'A little space': the psychic economy of Yeats's love poems." Criticism (Winter, 1993).
Vance, Norman. "Decadence from Belfast to Byzantium." New Literary History 35 (Autumn 2004).
Vendler, Helen. Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form. Harvard UP, 2007. Publisher's web site. Includes an interview with Professor Vendler. A review, in the NY Sun, by Sam Munson, 12 Dec., 2007.
Introduction
"William Butler Yeats." Biography, themes, style, mysticism, and more are covered in a reliable, encyclopedia-type article from the Poetry Foundation.
Spurr, Barry. "W.B. Yeats," in the Literary Encyclopedia, 26 August 2005.
Cusack, George. Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902), in the Literary Encyclopedia, 25 November 2004.
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.
"'Who Goes with Fergus?': The Transfiguration of Yeats in Ulysses." From Debora Sherman's class in Modern Irish Literature at Haverford College [James Joyce].
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.
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.
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 (UK) Guardian archive.
A very brief introduction to Yeats from the Academy of American Poets.
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 University of Indiana.
Yeats manuscript collection at Stony Brook University.
The Yeats collection at Queen's University, Ontario.
The Yeats manuscripts collection at Emory University.
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 materials related to Irish literature, history, and culture.
Yeats Society Sligo. About the Society, news, the Yeats Summer School and other events.
"Irish Playography." Database of new Irish plays produced professionally since 1904.
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 Univ.
Removed articles
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).
Flanagan, Thomas. "Yeats, Joyce, and the Matter of Ireland." First page of article only. Critical Inquiry 2 (Autumn, 1975) (moved).
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 (moved or removed).
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 (moved or removed).
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 (moved or removed).
Hyde, Virginia. "D. H. Lawrence, W. B. Yeats, and the Rosa Mundi," The South Carolina Review, 69 (removed).
McKinsey, Martin. "Classicism and Colonial Retrenchment in W. B. Yeats's 'No Second Troy.'" Twentieth Century Literature 48 (Summer, 2002) (removed).
Vendler, Helen. An analysis of Yeats's "Among School Children." A video presentation from Professor Helen Vendler's Harvard class "Poems, Poets, Poetry" (removed).
Witt, Marion. "The Making of an Elegy: Yeats's'In Memory of Major Robert Gregory.'" First page of article only. Modern Philology 48 (Nov., 1950)(removed).
Wood, Andelys. "Yeats and Measurement." First page of article only. South Atlantic Review, 50 (Nov., 1985) (removed).
Description of Yeats resources at the University of Texas (moved or removed).
W. B. Yeats Correspondence in the Lennox Robinson Collection at S. Illinois University (moved or removed).
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).
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