Product Description

Compiling nineteen essays and introductions, a volume with explanatory notes includes Per Amica Silentia Lunae and On the Boiler as well as introductions on Shelley and Balzac and essays on Irish poetry and politics.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #858958 in Books
• Published on: 1994-09-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 512 pages

From Library Journal
Yeats wrote these 19 essays, together here for the first time, from 1912 onwards; he included some in the Cuala Press volume Essays 1931-1936 and selected others for various editions of his collected works. Most important among them are the elegant "Per Amica Silentia Lunae," which discusses the mask theory, death, and spiritism, and the idiosyncratic introduction to the 1936 Oxford Book of Modern Verse . Several others deal with Indian themes. The meticulous nature of the editing can be judged by the fact that appendixes, notes, and other scholarly apparatus make up more than half the book. Most academic and all large public libraries must consider this excellent edition a necessary purchase.
- Robert E. Brown, Onondaga Cty. P.L., Syracuse, N.Y.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author
WILLIAM H. O'DONNELL is Professor and Chair at the Department of English, Memphis State University.

Customer Reviews

Yeat As Creative Critic
Yeats' literary criticism demonstrates his tenets and poetics-his working notions of poetry and culture-far more immediately and accessibly in his essays than he does in the web of arcana expounded in A Vision (q.v.). Of essays gathered here, some are seminal not only to Yeats' poetics but also to interpretive approaches to literature. The most significant-"The Philosophy of Shelley's Poetry" (precursor to archetypal symbolism and to Jungian ideas of the collective unconscious), "The Symbolism of Poetry," "The Celtic Element in Literature," "Certain Noble Plays of Japan" (the model of Yeats' Noh plays), and "A General Introduction for My Work."