Product Description

William Butler Yeats was Ireland's leading poet, chief architect of the Irish Literary Revival, and, according to T.S. Eliot, "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." In this absorbing new study, David Pierce provides a fresh perspective, one that attends as much to Yeats's English contexts as his Irish ones and to the preoccupations of his art. If he was critical of British attitudes toward Ireland, Yeats was also much taken with English life, with the coterie atmosphere of the Rhymers' Club in the 1890s, with membership of the Savile Club in London, with gatherings at English country houses. For this intimate portrait of Yeats, Pierce pays particular attention to the hitherto unappreciated role of the poet's English wife, George Yeats, whose presence, influence, and humor can be felt throughout the book.

Interweaving biography, criticism, and history, Pierce follows Yeats's life from his birth in Dublin in 1865 to his death in the south of France in 1939. He describes Yeats's family and home; his interest in the oral tradition, the occult, and automatic writing; his literary activities in London and Dublin; his work with the Abbey Theatre and his life during World War I; his response to the Irish War of Independence and the Civil War; his friendship with fellow-modernist Ezra Pound; his sympathy with fascism; and his rage against old age. Enriched with a wide range of illustrative material, including specially commissioned photographs, the book affords a timely reassessment of Yeats's worlds.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1645427 in Books
• Published on: 1995-10-25
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 360 pages

From Publishers Weekly
In this lavishly illustrated scholarly analysis of Nobel Prize-winning poet and dramatist William Butler Yeats (1865- 1939), Pierce (James Joyce's Ireland), a lecturer in English at the Univ. College of Ripon and York St. John, places a greater emphasis on his subject's connection to England than earlier studies have. Although Yeats was born in Ireland and was a leader of the 1890s' Irish Literary Revival, he spent a large part of his life in England, mingled easily in upper-class English social and cultural circles and married an English wife, Georgina (George) Hyde-Lees. Drawing on unpublished letters, old newspaper reports and other primary sources, the author provides a cultural context for his subject's Anglo-Irish identity. Although Pierce covers Yeats's love affair with Irish nationalist Maud Gonne, he focuses more on the previously unacknowledged influence of George on her husband's writings and on his career as an Irish senator. Pierce also examines the fascist sympathies Yeats displayed during his last years.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
"A rich assemblage of words and pictures which explores the poet's relationship with English culture as well as his Irishness. The illustrations range from ravishing shots of Lady Gregory sitting under the succulent catalpha tree at Coole to haunting images of rural poverty, and often provide a fascinating visual gloss on particular poems." -- The Independent

"An excellent choice for all college, university, and public libraries. Pierce combines biography, criticism, history, illustration, photography, and art to create a fresh, well-balanced, scholarly yet enormously entertaining book." -- Choice review

"Beautifully written and illustrated. . . . Interweaving, biography, criticism, and history, Pierce follows Yeats' life from his birth in Dublin in 1865 to his death in the South of France in 1939. This is a key work for studies of Yeats, the several worlds he moved in and the writings they engendered." -- Richard Edwards, Birmingham Post

"The book is a perfect present for any lover of Yeats's poetry, and good browsing for anyone interested in Ireland." -- Scotland on Sunday

"This book breaks new ground by arguing for a consideration of Yeats within the English tradition. . . . Lively and original . . . Pierce's book boldly rearranges the furniture in the Yeatsian household, and the biographers will have to take note." -- Terence Brown, Irish University Review

From the Author
After finishing James Joyce's Ireland I was asked by my editor at Yale University Press to consider writing another monograph, and this was the study I came up with. I didn't want to do what I had done in the Joyce book, which was an advanced introduction to the great writer where I pay particular attention to his Irishness and his Irish contexts. With Yeats I wanted to write a 'portrait' but seen now from an Irish-English context, where I focus on the tension between his native country and his English audience and English contexts, 'the Celt in London' as I call one of the sections in my chapter on 'Yeats and 1890s London'. As I was researching the book my attention was drawn toward Yeats's wife George Hyde-Lees. Indeed, at one stage, when I came across a hitherto unnoticed letter in the Yeats Collection at SUNY Stony Brook on Long Island suggesting it was she who sought to persuade him during the Irish Civil War in 1923 not to abandon Ireland but to tough it out, I felt a different sort of portrait of the poet emerging, one which would have been more female-centered. My closing paragraph written in 1994 can stand as a deliberately tentative conclusion as well as a sign of what became a new direction in Yeats studies where more attention has been devoted to her role in the construction of the poet's image. The book is now thirteen years old but still reads well and the photographs and images are as pristine as ever. I've been impressed by how well it was received.