W.B. Yeats's Robartes-Aherne Writings

W.B. Yeats's Robartes-Aherne Writings
Author: Wayne K. Chapman
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 364
Release: 2018-05-31
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1472595157

The figures of Michael Robartes and Owen Aherne appear throughout the writing of the great Irish poet W.B. Yeats, featuring in his poems, short fictions, dialogues and as authorities in notes to his work. Bringing together into one volume published and unpublished writings featuring these two enigmatic figures, W.B. Yeats's Robartes-Aherne Writings traces their history and the development of Yeats's mystical thought that culminated (twice) in the publication of his visionary work A Vision (1925, 1937). Including reproductions of manuscript and notebook pages as well as transcriptions and extracts from a wide range of Yeats's mystical writings and substantial commentary and annotation throughout, this book is an essential resource for scholars of Yeats's thought, his stylistic evolution and the esoteric influences on modernist writing in the early 20th century.

The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Volume XIII: A Vision

The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Volume XIII: A Vision
Author: William Butler Yeats
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2013-02-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 141659373X

The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume XIII: A Vision is part of a fourteen-volume series under the general editorship of eminent Yeats scholar George Bornstein and formerly the late Richard J. Finneran and George Mills Harper. One of the strangest works of literary modernism, A Vision is Yeats's greatest occult work. Edited by Yeats scholars Catherine E. Paul and Margaret Mills Harper, the volume presents the "system" of philosophy, psychology, history, and the life of the soul that Yeats and his wife George (née Hyde Lees) received and created by means of mediumistic experiments from 1917 through the early 1920s. Yeats obsessively revised the book, and the revised 1937 version is much more widely available than its predecessor. The original 1925 version of A Vision, poetic, unpolished, masked in fiction, and close to the excitement of the automatic writing that the Yeatses believed to be its supernatural origin, is presented here in a scholarly edition for the first time. The text, minimally corrected to retain the sense of the original, is extensively annotated, with particular attention paid to the relationship between the published book and its complex genetic materials. Indispensable to an understanding of the poet's late work and entrancing on its own merit, A Vision aims to be, all at once, a work of theoretical history, an esoteric philosophy, an aesthetic symbology, a psychological schema, and a sacred book. It is as difficult as it is essential reading for any student of Yeats.

The Oxford Handbook of W. B. Yeats

The Oxford Handbook of W. B. Yeats
Author: Lauren Arrington
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 753
Release: 2023-03-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0198834675

The forty-two chapters in this book consider Yeats's early toil, his practical and esoteric concerns as his career developed, his friends and enemies, and how he was and is understood. This Handbook brings together critics and writers who have considered what Yeats wrote and how he wrote, moving between texts and their contexts in ways that will lead the reader through Yeats's multiple selves as poet, playwright, public figure, and mystic. It assembles a variety of views and adds to a sense of dialogue, the antinomian or deliberately-divided way of thinking that Yeats relished and encouraged. This volume puts that sense of a living dialogue in tune both with the history of criticism on Yeats and also with contemporary critical and ethical debates, not shirking the complexities of Yeats's more uncomfortable political positions or personal life. It provides one basis from which future Yeats scholarship can continue to participate in the fascination of all the contributors here in the satisfying difficulty of this great writer.

Yeats’s Mask

Yeats’s Mask
Author: Margaret Mills Harper
Publisher: Open Book Publishers
Total Pages: 498
Release: 2013-12-20
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1783740175

Yeats’s Mask, Yeats Annual No. 19 is a special issue in this renowned research-level series. Fashionable in the age of Wilde, the Mask changes shape until it emerges as Mask in the system of A Vision. Chronologically tracing the concept through Yeats’s plays and those poems written as ‘texts for exposition’ of his occult thought which flowers in A Vision itself (1925 and 1937), the volume also spotlights ‘The Mask before The Mask’ numerous plays including Cathleen Ni-Houlihan, The King’s Threshold, Calvary, The Words upon the Window-pane, A Full Moon in March and The Death of Cuchulain. There are excurses into studies of Yeats’s friendship with the Oxford don and cleric, William Force Stead, his radio broadcasts, the Chinese contexts for his writing of ‘Lapis Lazuli’. His self-renewal after The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, and the key occult epistolary exchange ‘Leo Africanus’, edited from MSS by Steve L. Adams and George Mills Harper, is republished from the elusive Yeats Annual No. 1 (1982). The essays are by David Bradshaw, Michael Cade-Stewart, Aisling Carlin, Warwick Gould, Margaret Mills Harper, Pierre Longuenesse, Jerusha McCormack, Neil Mann, Emilie Morin, Elizabeth Müller and Alexandra Poulain, with shorter notes by Philip Bishop and Colin Smythe considering Yeats’s quatrain upon remaking himself and the pirate editions of The Land of Heart’s Desire. Ten reviews focus on various volumes of the Cornell Yeats MSS Series, his correspondence with George Yeats, and numerous critical studies. Yeats Annual is published by Open Book Publishers in association with the Institute of English Studies, University of London.

W.B. Yeats and the Muses

W.B. Yeats and the Muses
Author: Joseph M. Hassett
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2010-07-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0191614890

W.B. Yeats and the Muses explores how nine fascinating women inspired much of W.B. Yeats's poetry. These women are particularly important because Yeats perceived them in terms of beliefs about poetic inspiration akin to the Greek notion that a great poet is inspired and possessed by the feminine voices of the Muses. Influenced by the Pre-Raphaelite idea of woman as 'romantic and mysterious, still the priestess of her shrine', Yeats found his Muses in living women. His extraordinarily long and fruitful poetic career was fuelled by passionate relationships with women to and about whom he wrote some of his most compelling poetry. The book summarizes the different Muse traditions that were congenial to Yeats and shows how his perception of these women as Muses underlies his poetry. Newly available letters and manuscripts are used to explore the creative process and interpret the poems. Because Yeats believed that lyric poetry 'is no rootless flower, but the speech of a man,' exploring the relationship between poem and Muse brings new coherence to the poetry, illuminates the process of its creation, and unlocks the 'second beauty' to which Yeats referred when he claimed that 'works of lyric genius, when the circumstances of their origin is known, gain a second a beauty, passing as it were out of literature and becoming life.' As life emerges from the literature, the Muses are shown to be vibrant, multi-faceted personalities who shatter the idea of the Muse as a passive stereotype and take their proper place as begetters of timeless poetry.

Wisdom of Two

Wisdom of Two
Author: Margaret Mills Harper
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 400
Release: 2006-06-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0191516112

Georgie Hyde Lees, who married W. B. Yeats in the autumn of 1917, has for many years occupied a secondary or even marginal position in most studies of her famous husband. She has been depicted as a poor choice for romantic partner, political comrade, or literary collaborator. While often thanked in acknowledgments pages and regarded as a minor editor or secretary, she usually receives only footnote status in literary analyses. Most often, she has been cast as an amateur spirit medium or, less generously, as a manipulative perpetrator of an elaborate mystical and sexual hoax out of which arose Yeats's philosophical treatise A Vision and a raft of poetry, plays, and other literary works. Yet George Yeats co-wrote the automatic script and co-created the 'system' of cosmic geometry, based on a dialectics of desire. Coming to terms with the 'system' is vital to understanding the late work of the poet, yet a thorough critical study of the Yeatses' 'incredible experience' has never been written. Harper, one of few scholars who is intimately familiar with the large mass of documents, provides the first such study. She analyses the thousands of pages of published and unpublished papers, the particularities of their unusual composition, the finished literary works that depend upon them, and historical contexts such as the spiritualist movement, automatism (including its relation to communications technology), sexual politics, and war. Wisdom of Two airs critical and theoretical issues that are vital to understanding the Yeatses' spiritual, literary, and dramatic collaboration.

A Vision

A Vision
Author: W B Yeats
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Total Pages: 305
Release: 1959-12-31
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780333076897

Contents: a packet for Ezra Pound; stories of Michael Robartes and his friends: an extract from a record made by his pupils; phases of moon; great wheel; completed symbol; soul in judgment; great year of ancients; dove or swan; all soul's night, an epilogue. With many figures and illustrations.

"The Yeats Circle, Verbal and Visual Relations in Ireland, 1880?939 "

Author: KarenE. Brown
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2017-07-05
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1351539329

Focusing on W.B. Yeats's ideal of mutual support between the arts, Karen Brown sheds new light on how collaborations and differences between members of the Yeats family circle contributed to the metamorphosis of the Irish Cultural Revival into Irish Modernism. Making use of primary materials and fresh archival evidence, Brown delves into a variety of media including embroidery, print, illustration, theatre, costume design, poetry, and painting. Tracing the artistic relationships and outcome of W.B. Yeats's vision through five case studies, Brown explores the poet's early engagement with artistic tradition, contributions to the Dun Emer and Cuala Industries, collaboration between W.B. Yeats and Norah McGuinness, analysis of Thomas MacGreevy's pictorial poetry, and a study of literary influence and debt between Jack Yeats and Samuel Beckett. Having undertaken extensive archival research relating to word and image studies, Brown considers her findings in historical context, with particular emphasis on questions of art and gender and art and national identity. Interdisciplinary, this volume is one of the first full-length studies of the fraternit?es arts surrounding W.B. Yeats. It represents an important contribution to word and image studies and to debates surrounding Irish Cultural Revival and the formation of Irish Modernism.