Product Description

In the first full-scale biography of William Butler Yeats in more than 45 years, Keith Alldritt radically alters the traditional portrait of one of the greatest and most beloved poets of the 20th century. Placing Yeats within the context of his times, he reveals the determined careerist, shrewd manipulator, and political operator behind Yeats' familiar image as a dreamer, idealist and mystic. 16-page photo insert.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1188990 in Books
• Published on: 1997-04-29
• Released on: 1997-04-29
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 388 pages

Amazon.com Review
Like R. F. Foster in W. B. Yeats: A Life, Canadian scholar Keith Alldritt concentrates on Yeats's public activities and his relationships with others. (The poet's interior struggles and creativity are amply considered in Yeats's memoirs and Richard Ellmann's 1948 critical biography.) Alldritt's succinct work covers the entire life in broad strokes and links Yeats to developments in Europe as well as Ireland. His Yeats is no dreamy mystic, but a "brawler and scrapper," an ambitious careerist preoccupied with status and money--very human and accessible to the general reader.

From Library Journal
Perhaps because it must compete with the recently published first volume of R.F. Foster's W.B. Yeats: A Life (LJ 4/1/97), this shorter work attempts to set itself apart chiefly by debunking what it calls the familiar image of Yeats as "the sensitive introvert who began as the mooning dreamer and who, after a lifetime seeking philosophical and hermetic wisdom, ended as the learned sage." In its place, Alldritt (English, Univ. of British Columbia) presents an egotistic, money-grubbing, and quarrelsome snob. The Irish poet was, of course, all these things, and therefore it is curious that Alldritt should choose to portray Yeats as shallower and less pleasant that he actually was. There is new information in this book, but less on Yeats's poetry, for example, than on his late-life affairs with various toothsome young women. For literature collections.?David Kirby, Florida State Univ., Tallahassee
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
The creation of literature may be an individual enterprise, but its publication and distribution is a public one. Yet studies of important literary figures and movements often emphasize the lonely struggle to create rather than the often equally difficult, if less isolated, struggle for recognition. Alldritt presents a fascinating portrait of the latter aspect of the career of the towering genius of twentieth-century Irish poetry. Born into bohemian poverty, Yeats learned early to scramble for funding and position. Although his poems may have courted the powers of faerie, Yeats himself shrewdly courted contemporary taste, and a network of literary and political acquaintances helped draw attention to him at a time when his work showed only raw talent and an eye for high style. Later, that network provided him the wife who comforted his age while helping promote his image. Alldritt makes an intriguing and well-documented addition to Yeatsiana. Patricia Monaghan