Product Description

The first volume in an exhaustive biography covers the poet's first fifty years, revising previous assumptions about Yeats's background, his relationships with Maude Gonne and other women, and his role in shaping modern Irish identity. UP.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #868133 in Books
• Published on: 1997-04-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 704 pages

Amazon.com Review
There are several biographies of the great Irish poet to choose from, and the one you'll prefer depends on how much biography you want. Subtitled "The Apprentice Mage, 1865-1914," this is the one for completists (though they'll have to wait for Volume Two to get through Yeats's death in 1939). The author, a noted Irish historian, renders Yeats's life almost day to day, giving a particularly lively sense of the helter-skelter nature of his early years and a nice depiction of his tumultuous engagement with the Abbey Theatre.

From Publishers Weekly
In a poem ("The Choice") written in his late 60s, William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) asserted that "The intellect of man is forced to choose/Perfection of the life or of the work." Previous studies (notably those by Richard Ellmann, Denis Donoghue and A. Norman Jeffares) have concentrated on the work. In a significant departure from that approach, Irish historian Foster (a professor at Hertford College, Oxford, and biographer of Lord Randolph Churchill and Charles Stewart Parnell) focuses on what Yeats did rather than on what he wrote. Raised in genteel poverty in Dublin, Sligo and London, Yeats was largely self-taught. Beginning in his early 20s he threw himself into various unconventional pursuits?the occult, the theater and Irish nationalist politics?with feverish energy, moving restlessly between Ireland and England. While projecting an otherworldly air, early on Yeats took to heart Oscar Wilde's dictum that "a man should invent his own myth," and Foster shows how his "great talent for managing publicity" figured in the construction of his own artistic image. Driven by an almost ruthless need to dominate events, Yeats imposed himself at the center of cultural, literary and political controversy, making important friends (and enemies) in all walks of life. This meticulously researched "authorized" biography, prepared with the cooperation of Yeats's children, lets the facts speak for themselves and bears out T.S. Eliot's later observation that Yeats was "one of those few whose history is the history of their own time, who are part of the consciousness of an age which cannot be understood without them." Illustrations not seen by PW. (Apr.) FYI: Foster's biography is dedicated to the distinguished Irish historian F.S.L. Lyons, who at the time of his death in 1983 had been working on a biography of Yeats for nearly ten years. Foster drew on Lyon's extensive research notes but acknowledges that this book is very different from the one Lyons might have written.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Like a youth groomed for greatness, Foster (Paddy and Mr. Punch, Viking 1994) begins the first part of his two-volume biography of Yeats by thanking the literary parents it means to surpass, especially Richard Ellmann's Yeats: The Man and the Masks (1978). While Ellmann writes penetratingly on the major themes of Yeats's life and work, Foster (Irish history, Oxford Univ.) emphasizes as well the outer life of "this poetic genius who was also, both serially and simultaneously, a playwright, journalist, occultist, apprentice politician, revolutionary, state-manager, diner-out, dedicated friend, confidant, and lover of some of the most interesting people of his day." The work ends in Yeats's middle age, and while Foster comments on Yeats's often recondite poetry, he throws new light on the poet by taking many of his insights from the letters and ephemeral journalism that reflect Yeats's more spontaneous side. Highly recommended.?David Kirby, Florida State Univ., Tallahassee
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

The Lighthouse and the Anteater
For the first 100 pages or so, this book had me completely. Roy Foster writes with elegant brio and has a historian's eye for the wider events and contexts that shaped Yeats's early years. Where previous biographers like Ellman take a sort of lighthouse approach to their subject, treating the passions and conflicts of Yeats's day as fuel for the poetry that was destined to outshine them, Foster is more like an anteater, eagerly snuffling up the everyday bits of information that give the flavor of Yeats's multifaceted life as he actually lived it, before his later fame and incessant revisions smoothed it into a pattern.

After a while though, the book tends to bury Yeats in a mass of trivia that include everything from the menu at one of his literary dinners to the prices he charged for his lectures. This level of detail could be enlightening if Foster stopped for breath more often to tell us why these things are important. Too often though he keeps his head firmly down with the ants, cataloging the day-to-day intrigues of a very complicated life without linking them to any kind of larger interpretation of Yeats's personality or development. Instead, Foster spends his 500+ pages introducing new names at the rate of one or so per page, most of them disappearing by the end of the chapter never to be heard from again. We get the intrigues of various Irish nationalist factions, potted bios of minor figures on the Dublin and London art scenes, humorous sketches of Yeats's fellow-travellers in his sundry mystical societies. It was hard to see Yeats after a while with all these minor figures crowding the stage.

If Foster does have an interpretation of his own, as far as I can tell it's a revisionist one. Where Ellman or Jeffaries saw Yeats's life as a drama of painful self-creation, Foster sends to see an ambitious man on the make, an aggressive networker who wasn't beyond bending the truth if it helped his own advancement. Even his life-long passion for Maud Gonne, one of the key sources of his poetry, was, according to Foster, in part a self-conscious realization that a great poet needed a great passion to write about. In trying to bring Yeats back down to earth, I think Foster overcompensates by making him more canny and worldly than the sexual naivete, table rapping, faery talk and aesthetic posturing of these years suggest. Worst of all, Foster shows almost no interest in Yeats's poetry, the reason we're reading the biography in the first place. I put down the book admiring Foster's energy and mastery of such a huge anthill of facts, but I couldn't shake the feeling that a lot less would have told us a lot more.

Informative biography of a complicated man
William Butler Yeats offers a life of contradictions. Born in Dublin to a middle-class Protestant family, Yeats went on to become one of the premier poets of the twentieth century. As a writer and member of the Irish literary community, he also helped to forge Irish national identity through his words and his deeds. In this biography, the first of two volumes, Roy Foster offers an account of Yeats' development into one of the leading figures of the Irish literary scene.

This is not an easy book. Foster recounts Yeats' life in what is sometimes excruciating detail, covering every movement and literary battle the poet undertakes. Moreover, as he does so he assumes the reader's familiarity with both the background of late nineteenth century Ireland and the members of the Irish literary community. People appear in his narrative with little introduction, creating a confusing jumble of names that limits the appreciation of their role in Yeats' life.

Such problems aside, this is a first-rate biography. Foster does a great job examining Yeats' life, in a text that while long is never dense. His coverage of Yeats' occult interests is particularly good, as is that of the poet's involvement in nationalist causes - both integral aspects of his poetry. Foster's argument that Yeats' involvement in the mystical was a reaction to the declining position of Protestants in Ireland, an effort to cope with the sense of dislocation by asserting psychic control, is a compelling one that helps to fit more of his poetry into its contemporary context. Foster helps this process; while he asserts that his biography is about what Yeats did rather than what the poet wrote he does offer a perceptive commentary on aspects of Yeats' work, which helps us better appreciate the connection between the man and his writings. Thanks to this, we have a book that is essential for understanding such a complicated literary figure and the role he played in his times.

Surprises!
This is loaded with surprise after surprise. Foster's insights into the poetry, through historical and social readings, are often revelatory. My only complaint is that many of the tales he tells tend to have the same emotional architecture due to a descirptive repetition: this makes it a little monotonous at times. But this is a quibble. This book is great. When is Vol. 2 going to be published?