Amazon.com

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. ... Read more

Reviews (4)

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 the context of his times. 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. The result is a book that is essential for understanding such a complicated literary figure and the role he played in his times.

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.

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?

The Definitive Yeats Biography
R.F. Foster's two-volume biography (second volume to come in 2000) is a model of articulate and knowledgable scholarship, arguably comparable to the great biographies of Joyce and Wilde written by Richard Ellman. Foster's work leaves nothing to be desired. It easily excels previous Yeats biographies written by Cootes, Jeffares, etc. ... Read more

Book Description

The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume III: Autobiographies is part of the fourteen-volume series overseen by eminent Yeats scholars Richard J. Finnerah and George Mills Harper. The series includes virtually all of the Nobel laureate's published work, with authoritative and explanatory notes.

Autobiographies consists of six autobiographical works -- Reveries Over Childhood and Youth, The Trembling of the Veil, Dramatis Personae, Estrangement, The Death of Synge, and The Bounty of Sweden -- that William Butler Yeats published together in the mid-1930s to form a single, extraordinary memoir of the first fifty-eight years of his life, from his earliest memories of childhood to winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. This volume provides a vivid series of personal accounts of a wide range of figures, and it describes Yeats's work as poet and playwright, as a founder of Dublin's famed Abbey Theatre, his involvement with Irish nationalism, and his fascination with occultism and visions. This book is most compelling as Yeats's own account of the growth of his poetic imagination. Yeats thought that a poet leads a life of allegory, and that his works are comments upon it. Autobiographies enacts his ruling belief in the connections and coherence between the life that he led and the works that he wrote. It is a vision of personal history as art, and so it is the one truly essential companion to his poems and plays.

Edited by William H. O'Donnell and Douglas N. Archibald, this volume is available for the first time with invaluable explanatory notes and includes previously unpublished passages from candidly explicit first drafts. ... Read more

Reviews (2)

A joy to read and marvellous background
The more I have learnt about Yeats and his life the more approachable and enjoyable I have found his poetry.

I bought this book for a close friend and fellow lover of Yeats poetry and read it after she did. Yeats writes about his life and philosophy with the same skill and breadth he brings to his poetry. I found the notes added for this edition both useful and interesting. I would recommend this book to anyone with an interest in Yeats, his philosophy, life and poetry.

This new, standard edition is the first to provide notes.
This new, standard edition is the first to provide explanatory notes. The text has been rigorously checked against earlier editions and manuscripts. The index usefully includes both the text and the notes. (I am editor of the book.) ... Read more

Book Description

The first volume in Roy Foster's magisterial biography of W.B. Yeats was hailed as 'a work of huge significance' (The Atlantic Monthly) and 'a stupendous historiographical feat' (Irish Sunday Independent). Now, the eagerly awaited second volume explores the complex poetic, political, and personal intricacies of Yeats's dramatic final decades, a period that saw the Easter Rebellion, the founding of the Irish state in 1922, and the production of Yeats's greatest masterpieces.In the conclusion of this first fully authorized biography, Foster brilliantly illuminates the circumstances--the rich internal and external experiences--that shaped the great poetry of Yeats's later years: 'The Wild Swans at Coole,' 'Sailing to Byzantium,' 'The Tower,' 'The Circus Animals Desertion,' 'Under Ben Bulben,' and many others. Yeats's pursuit of Irish nationalism and an independent Irish culture, his continued search for supernatural truths through occult experimentation, his extraordinary marriage, a series of tempestuous love affairs, and his lingering obsession with Maud Gonne are all explored here with a nuance and awareness rare in literary biography. Foster gives us the very texture of Yeats's life and thought, revealing the many ways he made poetry out of the 'quarrel' with himself and the upheaval around him. But this consummate biography also shows that Yeats was much more than simply a lyric poet and examines in great detail Yeats's non-poetic work--his essays, plays, polemics, and memoirs. The enormous and varied circle of Yeats's friends, lovers, family, collaborators and antagonists inhabit and enrich a personal world of astounding energy, artistic commitment and verve; while the poet himself is shown returning again and again to his governing preoccupations, sex and death. Based on complete and unprecedented access to Yeats's papers and written with extraordinary grace and insight, W.B. Yeats, A Life offers the fullest portrait yet of the private and public life of one of the twentieth century's greatest poets. ... Read more

Reviews (2)

Messin' With Ellmann et al
I agree, largely, with what I've read here. Foster *is* an anteater, to quote one Amazon reviewer.

On the other hand, you're dealing with Yeats. Yeats was probably the most sophisticated thinker about literary persona and literary stance that Western literature has ever produced. Only Shakespeare--who, as far as we know, never theorized explicitly about any of this, much less wrote it down--surpasses him, and not by design. Such figures as Pound are nothing in comparison. It should come as no surprise that Yeats' own autobiographical material is forbidding in the extreme; if you get past that you have Ellmann to deal with, and you'd best go loaded for bear.

Foster has taken a blunderbuss, since Ellmann showed up with a rifle. Nonetheless, both approaches are invaluable. Foster's work is magisterial, even if it's not a great literary biography *taken as such*. On the other hand, it offers an incredible resource for the serious student of Yeats. Detail aside (helpful as that is to scholars) Foster makes a very good case for Yeats' persona-management in public and private, something I have come to feel is essential to understanding the poet and which, along with the occult study, has been imperfectly examined. (See Maddox's ridiculous effort for an example of this at its worst.)

Read together, though, both major biographies tend to compliment each other very nicely. Give that a try.

Te Diem
If I may be permitted to speak oxymoronically, this book as it once indispensable and utterly useless. It is indispensable for the sheer wealth and weight of fact it carries. The book constitutes a veritable rhapsody of small details, collected without due regard for relevance and with every regard for hanging on the the myriad fruits of bibliophilia. How then is it useless?It is useless because it dispenses with the immense effort - at once imaginative and cognitive - of reconstructing the relationships and the world to which the work and activity of Yeats was a response and against which he defined himself. This task of reconstruction is never only a matter of painstaking factual excavation. It is a question of reimagining a whole "field of force" (Wittgenstein) into which, so to speak, the poet was "thrown". This bok is a heroic but antiquarian leviathan. ... Read more

Book Description

The definitive biography of William Butler Yeats. The most influential poet of his age, Yeats eluded the grasp of many who sought to explain him. In this classic critical examination of the poet, Richard Ellmann strips away the masks of his subject: occultist, senator of the Irish Free State, libidinous old man, and Nobel Prize winner. ... Read more

Reviews (3)

Biograph Master
Ellmann was only 30 when he published this in 1948, less than 10 years after Yeats's death; he was the first biographer to see Yeats's papers in their chaotic entirety. What an astounding job! You'd think this would read like a warm-up for his later magisterial biographies of Joyce and Wilde, but "The Man and the Masks" holds its own against those works, giving a sensitive, economical portrait of an unusually fractured poet.

Ellmann stresses Yeats's life-long effort to forge his thoughts into a unified system in the teeth of inbred skepticism, shyness and vacillation. He draws a discreet curtain over the sexual parts of Yeats's life but compensates with a keen understanding of the courage it took for this diffident, ill-read & dreamy man to make himself by fits and starts into a modern poet. My favorite parts of the book were the sections where Ellmann compares earlier drafts of the poems to the printed versions, showing just how hard-won Yeats's genius was. He tempers a critical eye towards Yeats's excesses--the wild mysticism, the Fascist sympathies, the arrogant public demeanor--with an understanding of Yeats's deep need for masks. According to Ellmann, Yeats's theories and systems weren't dogmas so much as postures he assumed to fulfill his own desire for a certainty of belief he never quite attained. Ellmann shows how that drive shaped the poems and ultimately rescued them from the deadness certitude would have brought. A classic study and an excellent starting-point for further reading on Yeats's life and work.

Admirable, but not Perfect
Though I have the greatest admiration for Ellman, I must say that this critical biography of Yeats has a few too many blindspots, is too vague and shapeless in its outline of Yeats' life, to satisfy entirely. Roy Foster's two-volume account is ultimately preferable because far more complete.

Casting a Cold Eye
THE definitive, open, and engaging study of the man T.S.Eliot declared the greatest poet of his age. Richard Ellman is no longer with us, but this is a monument of Yeats biography and criticism, the book which all subsequent biographers try to rewrite. The text itself, written as it was amidst a flurry of uncollected papers in the forties and with the co-operation of W.B.'s widow George, is understandably reticent about some elements of the poet's private life, notably his early lovers and extra-marital affairs; but the introduction printed with this new edition fills in many of the blanks, and gives the reasoning for Ellman's assertion that Yeats's affair with Maud Gonne was indeed finally consummated, confirming a suspicion hitherto based only on ambiguous references in letters and the poem 'A Man Young and Old'. Most of all, however, it is Ellman's sensitive and insightful treatment of Yeats's at once shy and self-possessed nature that impresses; the writer will never have a more accurate critic, and the man never a more sincere and biting appraisal of his contradictions. This is the place to start if you are interested in Yeats: you may not find the book or the man that you were expecting, an easy dreamy life of lost women and lake isles, but the portrait is truer, and the artistic genius more clearly delineated than in any other book on the subject, and there have been many. Ellman went on to write the definitive lives of James Joyce and Oscar Wilde; that his first essay in literary biography stands comparison with these is its own testament. ... Read more

Book Description

Half a century ago, Norman Jeffares wrote the definitive biography of W.B. Yeats, which was subsequently published in a revised edition in 1990 to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the poet's death. The present volume, a re-issue of the 1990 edition with a new introduction and bibliography, is an account of Yeats's life and work, together with a fascinating collection of letters, photographs and poetry. ... Read more

Book Description

At once praised and condemned by his contemporaries and by critics ever since for his highly complex poetic vision, William Butler Yeats remains one of the most important and controversial twentieth-century poets.In what has become a classic work of literary criticism, award-winning critic Harold Bloom breaks new ground with his radical interpretation of Yeats' relationship to the English Romantic tradition. Yeats tells the continuous story of the lifelong influence of Shelley, Blake, and the Romantic tradition upon Yeats' work.Through his analysis of the full spectrum of Yeats' poems and plays, Bloom offers a profound reinterpretation of poetic influence in general. ... Read more

Book Description

Book Description

"I have desired, like every artist, to create a little world out of the beautiful, pleasant, and significant things of this marred and clumsy world, and to show in a vision something of the face of Ireland..."

Ireland is home to some of the world's most enchanting myths and tales. But many of these stories would have been lost if they hadn't been recorded and written down.

Poet and Nobel laureate William Butler Yeats was one of these fortunate witnesses. In THE CELTIC TWILIGHT, originally published in 1893, he collected some of the most delightful myths and folktales of his native land. Yeats recalls stories about the devil, sorcerers, faeries, village ghosts, and unexplainable events. They illuminate a world of magical and miraculous creatures and constitute a worldview that can also be glimpsed in Yeats' acclaimed poetry and plays. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

An Excellent Guide to Understanding Yeats' Early Poetry
When Robert Frost (A not very likable fellow, when you read his biographies, despite his excellent poetry.) visited Yeats in Ireland, he made a comment to the effect that, "It's no wonder he believes in faeries." He was responding to the beautiful, mystical Irish landscape Yeats grew up in. This book, even though you're (probably) not in Ireland when you read it, will have you responding much as Frost did. The peasantry have so much of their pagan ancestry in their blood that, despite their ostensible Catholicism, their deep belief in "the little people" comes out as strong as ever when questioned about it. Reading these anecdotes, some of them grafted directly onto Yeats' early poetry, gives them a power they would not have had you not read this book and realized how "here and now" faeryland was to the common people at the time. The Celtic belief that death (into Faeryland)is far more desirable than birth is made beautifully apparent in this book. Hence, by the way, the celebratory Irish wake. Hence also this lovely poem

Heardst thou not sweet words among That Heaven-resounding minstrelsy? Heardst thou not that those who die Awake in a world of ecstacy? That love, when limbs are interwoven, And sleep when the night of life is cloven, And thought, to the world's dim boudaries clinging, And music, when one beloved is singing, Is death?

These sorts of things, as well as Yeats' poetry, are worth deep consideration in this present world where medicine is deemed omnipotent...and yet, nevertheless, we all die. ... Read more

Amazon.com

Biographer Brenda Maddox is interested in a very specific element of W.B. Yeats' life--his relationship with his wife--so she employs an unusual strategy for a biography. She begins Yeats' Ghosts more than halfway through Yeats' life--1917, when the poet is 51. She injects readers into her subject's life just as Yeats' relationship with "George," Georgie Hyde-Lees, is culminating in marriage. Yeats had been in love with another woman, Maud Gonne (reputedly "the most beautiful woman in Ireland"), but George developed what Maddox considers "one of the most ingenious strategies ever tried to take a husband's mind off another woman." Capitalizing on Yeats' fascination with the occult, she revealed herself to be a spirit medium, adept at "automatic writing." Yeats studied the garbled messages George channeled from these "Communicators" and forged the results into his extraordinarily powerful late poetry. As Maddox makes plain, George used her husband's belief in her spiritual talents to control him, "cutting Yeats off from his other occult associates and making him wholly dependent on her." With its strong focus on the interests and obsessions that informed Yeats' work, rather than the poetry itself, this subtly written biography offers a rare insight into the imaginative life of a great poet. --Adam Roberts, Amazon.co.uk ... Read more

Reviews (6)

Cast a Cold Eye
Look, Brenda Maddox is a journalist not a scholar. She has little to say about the poems and her sources are nothing new. But she writes a lively prose with a deft eye for the human angle in describing the parade of remarkable women who passed through Yeats's later life. I don't think she's out to replace the more detailed biographies other reviewers mention so much as add color and detail to the standard portrait of the 'smiling public man.'

The book's centerpiece is the early years of Yeats's marriage to his wife George, a cultivated woman twenty-seven years his junior who turned what looked to be a marriage of convenience into a source of great poetic inspiration. George began channeling spirits on their honeymoon which, over the next two years, revealed to Yeats an entire philosophy of history and the soul's fate after death while also dictating how an older, indifferent lover ought to treat a young new wife. Maddox leaves the question of the Script's authenticity open, pointing out on the one hand how well it suited George's purposes and on the other how sincerely she shared Yeats's occult beliefs. Halfway through the book though, after a short, out of place chapter on Yeats's mother, she leaves George behind to concentrate on the eccentricities of Yeats's later years. Yeats had a capacity for staying 'forever young' that led to some odd connections; he involved himself, especially after the Steinach operation, with a cast of dubious individuals who took him away from the unwanted responsibilities of home and family.

I don't think Maddox is trying to pull Yeats off a pedestal--she clearly believes the poems he wrote in these years are great. She's also fair-minded in dealing with Yeats's Fascist sympathies, his late passion for eugenics and the bad rap he's gotten from feminists. But showing how much care and indulgence his work required from others, especially the women he chose to attend to his needs, reminds you that greatness is often a collaborative effort. Giving credit where credit is due for Yeats's late achievement, especially in the case of his long-suffering wife George, takes nothing away from his achievement. Just the opposite; I admired the poetry all the more knowing the personal hopes and (sometimes) blindnesses it grew out of. A fun, instructive read.

revealing, but unsatisfying
Maddox's focus is on the people that revolved around Yeats--his wife, lovers, relatives, and peers. She relays several intimate anecdotes concerning Yeats's troubled relationships with his parents, his obsessions with women like Maude Gonne and her daughter, Iseult, and his interaction with a long line of "mother figures" (most notably, Lady Gregory).

Reading this book gave me the impression that Yeats wrote not just because he was inspired by Ireland and metaphysical themes; but as a need to escape his stifling environment.

While providing many interesting details about Mrs. Yeats's "abilities" with automatic writing, Maddox goes far in portraying Georgie as more of a controlling wife than a powerful medium. This, along with Yeats's own "psychic experiences" may lead a skeptic to wonder just how sane the poet actually was.

The section dealing with his term as a Free State Senator was good, in terms of illustrating Yeats' ongoing battle against censorship and civic divorce (in contrast with his reported stances on fascism and eugenics). Readers can revel in how Yeats, while conservative in such things as parenting, thoroghly enjoyed playing the "dirty old man" in various media--print, theater, and radio. As far as a deeper insight into Yeats as mystical poet, though, the book's treatment of the man is sketchy at best.

Spooked by the Imaginary?
Imagine a poet who is so absorbed in his interior life and imagination that his wife resorts to speaking with the dead and the spirit world--simply to keep the man interested. That's what Barbara Maddox insists in her wonderfully inclusive biography, "Yeats's Ghosts."

By nearly every assessment, W. B. Yeats stands as the greatest poet of the 20th Century. The ultimate symbolist, Yeats, however, remains an exceptionally difficult poet to fully appreciate--mainly because of the arcane and personal perspectives and references that litter nearly every one of his poems. Many readers, in fact, find it necessary to purchase a concordance of his work, and one publisher even offers a guide to the works of a poet who himself chose to speckle his books with countless footnotes and clarifications. Which, only naturally, are together a godsend.

"Yeats's Ghosts," a controversial biography by the award-winning Barbara Maddox, may help readers to understand the milleux in which Yeats wrote--the current events that engendered work after work, the personal friends to and about whom many were originally composed, and the continual wash of Celtic mythology--but what's especially entertaining about the book is its unique take on one of the most contentious issues regarding Yeats.

Yeats, after all, was a mystic--a mystic in the old Celtic Tradition--caught between scientific rationalism on the one hand and orthodox Christianity on the other. Like many Irishmen living on the cusp of the modern age, Yeats actively hoped for a renaissance of ancient Irish virtues--something along the lines of prewar Germany's obsession with getting rid of influences that had garbled and partially eradicated national and racial identities.

A member of the famous Order of the Golden Dawn (along with the maleviolent Aleister Crowley), Yeats, according to some, indulged in the occult; others find that probability suspect, citing that it is hard to believe that a poet of such gifts would be such a pushover for what most people consider "spurious information." Whatever the case, as Maddox quickly reveals, Yeats as a personality was definitely not of this age, an age that has yet to make a compromise with the imagination as a cultural and artistic force. In fact, without an understanding of the occult nuances hidden within his poems, most readers will find themselves frustrated with another collision with the inpenetrable words of a brilliant man and seminally Irish poet.

The book begins with Yeats's marriage on-the-rebound--at fifty-- to Georgie Hyde-Lee, an attractive bohemian he'd met through the Golden Dawn. But he's still obsessed with his almost mythical femme fatale, Irish revolutionary Maud Gonne--and infatuated with her daughter Iseult. Yeats was probably not as conducive to marriage as he wanted to be, and, according to Maddox, his new wife quickly sensed it. When she began a regimen of automatic writing to contact the spirit world, however, Yeats's interest rapidly rose, and over the course of their marriage, it may have been Georgie's flirtations with the occult that held the marriage together.

There are, of course, other "ghosts" in Maddox's life of Yeats, his relationship to an emotionally unavailable mother amongst them, but many of Maddox's assertions are too much of a flirtation with another relatively spurious paradigm, Freudianism. Some of her readings in the yellow light of psychoanalysis are really a reach--she's really digging, really really digging--and it's necessary to remember that Yeats's poetry is not defiant of definition but out of its realm completely. Not surprisingly, Maddox's drive to find a reasonable explanation for an inner life completely enthralled with the imaginary tends to limit what she is seeking to convey--a fully understandable vision of a poet who, for all practical purposes, spurned the idea of personality, at least in its more traditional manifestations. Consequently, Maddox's pictures seem more like snapshots that tend to trivialize a man who, more than likely, will never be fully understood. Often the object of Maddox's well-written tale comes off as a deluded old fool--although anyone who has read and wondered over the majesty of his poetic works can't help but wonder if there really wasn't something to the imaginary world in which he thrilled.

Mediocre
This work performs the useful function of paying some attention to Mrs. Yeats and Yeats' domestic life, but is essentially a mediocre and sloppy piece of work, full of hasty, half-baked judgment, and occassional smarmy irreverence. Roy Foster's biography, though long, is infinitely to be preferred.

Yeats Trashed
Brenda Maddox missed her calling in life: she should have been a writer for one of the tabloid newspapers in the grocery-store checkout lines. With an eye for whatever is unflattering or sensational she has combed the archives and written an account of the later decades of Yeats's life that lacks intelligence, dignity and any real expertise about Yeats's work. Little of what she relates will be new to scholars in the field, but then they aren't the real audience for the book, which obviously is intended to rack up sales. That the author relates Yeats's faults is acceptable; but that she exaggerates them, and fails to put them into a proper context, is not. For example, the fact that Yeats as an old man suffered from various physical infirmities is for Maddox a subject almost for derision, whereas the normal attitude would be to admire all the more the courage of his refusal to capitulate to "devouring Time" and the greatness of his accomplishments as an artist whose work improved throughout his life and who preserved his passion for perfection in the writing even of his very last poem. Little is actually said about the poetry and plays in this book and that little is almost all derivative or naive. There are also numerous errors of fact and the book has been sloppily proofread. The potential reader will be well advised to save his or her money for the responsible studies of Yeats's and his wife's lives currently being prepared by Roy Foster and Ann Saddlemyer. (Foster's splendid biography of the early years was published in 1997.) ... Read more

Book Description

Explores the esoteric and often hidden side of one of the most important writers of the 20-th century. In addition to being a celebrated poet, Yeats was also a leading occultist, schooled in the initiatory mysteries of the West, and a member of the Golden Dawn. Graf meticulously documents and elucidates Yeats's magical practices and their relation to his work. Includes an in-depth analysis of the magical diaries written by Yeats and his wife. Notes. Bibliography. Index. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

Yeats's Occultism Explored with Intelligence
Susan Johnston Graf has done something quite rare in Yeats criticism. She has examined the poets occult beliefs without prejudice, accepted them for what they were, and examined exactly what they might mean to his writing, without any snide disclaimers or protestations of disbelief which usually accompanies such studies.

In the first fourth of the book Ms Graf gives a clear summary of W. B. Yeats's occult background in Theosophy, his long association with the Order of the Golden Dawn and its successors, his formation of several Celtic magical orders, and his later interests in spiritualism. The real core of the work is the detailed examination of Per Amica Silentia Luna (1916) perhaps Yeats's most understudied and most underrated book. Squeezing meaning from this work is rather like deciphering a coded document, because it is written in Yeats's most carefully crafted, measured, and completely deceptive prose. Many turns of phrases heretofore interpreted as poetic figures of speech by literary academics are revealed by Graf to be Yeats's own private esoteric terms with specific, concrete meanings. Most Yeats scholars have considered Per Amica to be an obscure prelude to A Vision (1925 and 1934), but Graf reveals it to be a unique and revealing work, in many ways expressing ideas much different and different from its better known cousin.

The final chapters deals with the series of mediumistic experienced by Yeats bride Georgie (known as George) Hyde-Lees which began to occur four days after their wedding in October 1917. These mediumistic experiences, became the basics of Yeats's new "philosophy" published the two versions of A Vision, and became the underpinning of almost everything he wrote during the later period of his life.

Graf's book forms a powerful antithesis to Brenda Maddox's recent odorous book Yeats's Ghosts (1999), which suggested that the entire visionary experience of Yeates was driven by the ticking of Mrs Yeats' biological time-clock, and that she faked the entire mediumistic experience to keep her husband's interest and to deliver instructions about their sex lives designed to produce pregnancy in the most efficient manner. Instead Graf advances a more reasonable thesis: that the Yeats were engaged in a form of sex magic, guided the supernal intelligences toward the creation of "children of a higher order," perhaps an Irish Avatar for the new age. This does not negate the ticking of George's time-clock, or her desire to have children as a motive, but recognizes and accepts the deeply held occult convictions of both of the Yeates.

Graf's book may signal a new "middle ground" approach the Yeats's occult interests such as been recently applied to the history of Theosophy by K Paul Johnson and Joscelyn Godwin. If so, she has performed an invaluable service to the study of Yeats. ... Read more

Book 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. ... Read more

Book Description

Ann Saddlemyer's biography of W. B. Yeats's wife, George, portrays an extraordinarily talented, intelligent, and self-effacing woman, whose creative influence has never before been fully understood. She was wife and manager of a famous poet, and mother to his children, but in her own right also an inspired visionary and a practical woman of the arts. Georgie Hyde Lees was raised in London's literary salons, where arts, anthroposophy and the occult met. An accomplished linguist, art student and literary scholar, she married W. B. Yeats when she was 25, and he 52. Her supernatural "automatic writing" became the inspiration of Yeats's poetry and thought for the last 20 years of his life, yet she always concealed the depth of their collaboration. Close friend of many writers and poets, among them Frank O'Connor and Ezra Pound, she spent her long widowhood steering the "Yeats industry" and actively assisting younger scholars and writers. For the first time, this intelligent and creative woman is allowed to take center stage. Drawing on memoirs and a wealth of unknown and unpublished sources, this biography by the distinguished scholar Ann Saddlemyer reveals someone much more significant than just '"Mrs. W. B. Yeats"--a personality at once visionary and practical, and an important figure in twentieth-century literary history. ... Read more

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Interweaving biography, criticism, and history, David Pierce follows the life of Ireland`s leading poet from his birth in Dublin in 1865 to his death in the south of France in 1939. Enriched with a wide range of illustrative material, including specially commissioned photographs, this absorbing new study provides a fresh perspective on Yeats, attending as much to his English contexts as his Irish ones and to the preoccupations of his art. ... Read more

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The correspondence of two poets form the pages of this book. ... Read more

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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. ... Read more