Product Description

Ireland's greatest poet, William Butler Yeats, was also perhaps the most outstanding poet to have written in English since Wordsworth. Many of his early poems--wistful, mysterious, and suffused with Pre-Raphaelite imagery--are of haunting beauty. But in the early 1900s Yeats became disillusioned with this twilight, imaginary world and turned his thoughts increasingly to reality. Directing his energies to the twin causes of the Irish literary renaissance and Irish national independence, he evolved a new style: austere but capable of sustained magnificence. Michel Mac Liammir and Eavan Boland trace Yeats's long and eventful career, covering such episodes as his directorship of the Abbey Theatre and service in the Irish Senate, as well as his poetic activities. They analyze, with acuteness and humor, the contradictory qualities of a genius who was both lovable and forbidding, sophisticated and unworldly, a practical mystic and a superstitious realist.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1166705 in Books
• Published on: 1986-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 144 pages

Review
The illustrations...bring to our eyes places and houses associated with Yeats throughout his career. -- The New York Times Book Review