Book Description
The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume IX: Early Articles and Reviews is part of a fourteen-volume series under the general editorship of eminent Yeats scholars Richard J. Finneran and George Mills Harper. This first complete edition includes virtually all of the Nobel laureate's published work, in authoritative texts with extensive explanatory notes.

Coedited by John P. Frayne and Madeleine Marchaterre, Early Articles and Reviews assembles the earliest examples of Yeats's critical prose, from 1886 to the end of the century -- articles and reviews that were not collected into book form by the poet himself. Gathered together now, they show the earliest development of Yeats's ideas on poetry, the role of literature, Irish literature, the formation of an Irish national theater, and the occult, as well as Yeats's interaction with his contemporary writers. As seen here, Yeats's vigorous activity as magazine critic and propagandist for the Irish literary cause belies the popular picture created by his poetry of the "Celtic Twilight" period, that of an idealistic dreamer in flight from the harsh realities of the practical world.

This new volume adds four years' worth of Yeats's writings not included in a previous (1970) edition of his early articles and reviews. It also greatly expands the background notes and textual notes, bringing this compilation up to date with the busy world of Yeats scholarship over the last three decades. Early Articles and Reviews is an essential sourcebook illuminating Yeat's reading, his influences, and his literary opinions about other poets and writers.

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Book Description
The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume VIII: The Irish Dramatic Movement is part of a fourteen-volume series under the general editorship of eminent Yeats scholars Richard J. Finneran and George Mills Harper. This complete edition includes virtually all of the Nobel laureate's published work, in authoritative texts and with extensive explanatory notes.

Edited by the distinguished Yeats scholars Mary FitzGerald and Richard J. Finneran, The Irish Dramatic Movement gathers together -- for the first time -- all of the poet's time-honored essays on drama and the groundbreaking movement that led to the enduring Irish theater of today.

Although the reputation of W. B. Yeats as one of the preeminent writers of the twentieth century rests primarily on his poetry, drama and the theatre were among his abiding concerns. Indeed, in 1917 he wrote, "I need a theatre; I believe myself to be a dramatist." Here in this volume is the collection of all his major dramatic criticism for the years 1899-1919, including previously uncollected material.

A practicing dramatist himself, Yeats had strong convictions about the goals of the Irish theater and the appropriate plays to be produced. The essays in this collection address many topics, from the turbulent early years of what became the Abbey Theatre to the controversies over the plays of John Millington Synge and the relationship between drama and nationalism. Also evident are Yeats's judgments on numerous plays, playwrights, and productions, both in Irish and in English.

FitzGerald and Finneran's volume includes an Introduction and a History of the Text, as well as copious but unobtrusive annotation. The Irish Dramatic Movement is an essential volume for both readers of Yeats and students of the early years of twentieth-century theater.

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Book Description
1893. This is a collection of Irish stories of the supernatural and uncanny, based on country beliefs, traditions and folk tales. Contents: The Celtic Twilight; The Secret Rose; Stories of Red Hanrahan; Rosa Alchemica; Tables of the Law; Adoration of the Magi; and Per Amica Silentia Lunae. This book is essential for all the readers of Yeats' poetry and plays. It reveals that Yeats could work unique enchantment in prose, as well as poetry. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

A Fascinating Collection from Ireland's Mythical Tradition.
_Mythologies_ by Irish national poet, William Butler Yeats, is a fascinating collection from the writings of Yeats featuring various stories and legends which reveal Ireland's mythical and spiritual tradition.W. B. Yeats was regarded as Ireland's greatest poet and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923.But, Yeats was also an occultist who belonged to the secret society, the Golden Dawn, as well as an Irish nationalist and promoter of the Celtic renaissance.This book is a very interesting collection from his writings featuring tales of Gaelic magic, fairies, demons, curses, banshees, ghosts, and mysticism.It represents an excellent introduction to the writings of Yeats and to his mystical thought.

The first section of this book contains extracts from _The Celtic Twilight_, first published in 1893.There are in total forty separate tales presented from _The Celtic Twilight_.These include stories featuring fairies and ghosts and various elements of Irish folklore.Yeats states that most of the tales in this book were told to him by Paddy Flynn, an old Irishman.In particular, Yeats is influenced by the poetry of Dante, as he traces out the role of the afterlife in heaven, hell, and purgatory for souls trapped between the two.Yeats also emphasizes the roles of the Sidhe, fairies, and banshees.

The second section of this book contains extracts from _The Secret Rose_ published in 1897 along with _The Stories of Red Hanrahan_ and _Rosa Alchemica_._The Secret Rose_ contains nine separate chapters, many of them featuring bizarre tales including a tale of crucifixion._The Stories of Red Hanrahan_, emphasizing a schoolmaster and a mysterious game of cards, rewritten with the help of Lady Gregory in 1907, contains six tales.

The next section of the book contains the following parts:_Rosa Alchemica_, _The Tables of the Law_, and _The Adoration of the Magi_, published in 1897.These include discussions of alchemy and the occult as well as Yeats' discussion of Christianity.Finally, the book ends with extracts from _Per Amica Silentia Lunae_, published in 1917.This section includes five chapters.Mention is made of various alchemical and occult traditions including mention of the medieval mystic Joachim of Fiore who proposed three world ages, an Age of the Father, an Age of the Son, and an Age of the Holy Ghost.Throughout these sections the occult development of Yeats can be seen as he deals with various occult figures who further his spiritual understanding.

This book provides an excellent introduction to the writings of W. B. Yeats, Irish national poet and occultist.The book contains important extracts from his beautiful writings which serve to illuminate various components of the Irish/Celtic tradition.

Irish lore and legends
In this volume you get The Celtic Twilight (1893), 34 Irish stories about the supernatural, where little people, faeries, ghosts (some of them headless) abound; most of them have been collected from the people who remember this old lore, but a few of them, like A Voice, and The Old Town, are from Yeats' own experience.
The second part is The Secret Rose (1897), 9 legends that are perhaps my favorite section of this book, with stories like The Wisdom of the King, of a lonely hero who as a baby was given a "grey as the mist" drop of hawk crone blood, and whose hair was mixed with feathers.
Stories of Red Hanrahan (1897 and rewritten in 1907), is the life and death of a wandering poet, "the learned man and the great songmaker", which includes a number of poems.

Rosa Alchemica, Tables of the Law, and The Adoration of the Magi (1897) are on esoteric mysticism; glimpses into heaven and hell.
The final part is Per Amica Silentia Lunae (1917), essays on spiritualism, Christianity, poetry and its writers, and more.
Written with much beauty by the man many consider to be Ireland's greatest poet (and Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923), this unique collection of tales will enchant anyone interested in Irish history and its legends; legends whichwill, like the little creatures, last "until God shall burn up the world with a kiss". ... Read more

Book Description
Yeats was a leading 20th century poet and dramatist. He was a co founder of the Abbey Theater. In 1923 he won the Nobel Prize in literature. Many believe he wrote his greatest works after receiving the Nobel Prize. Yeats's writing is said to bridge the gap between the romantic period and the modern era. Four Years begins: "At the end of the eighties my father and mother, my brother and sisters and myself, all newly arrived from Dublin, were settled in Bedford Park in a red-brick house with several wood mantelpieces copied from marble mantlepieces by the brothers Adam, a balcony, and a little garden shadowed by a great horse-chestnut tree. Years before we had lived there, when the crooked, ostentatiously picturesque streets, with great trees casting great shadows, had been anew enthusiasm: the Pre-Raphaelite movement at last affecting life. But now exaggerated criticism had taken the place of enthusiasm; the tiled roofs, the first in modern London, were said to leak, which they did not, & the drains to be bad, though that was no longer true; and I imagine that houses were cheap." ... Read more

Book Description
The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume X: Later Articles and Reviews is part of a fourteen-volume series under the general editorship of eminent Yeats scholars Richard J. Finneran and George Mills Harper. This first complete edition includes virtually all of the Nobel laureate's published work, in authoritative texts and with extensive explanatory notes.

Later Articles and Reviews consists of fifty-four prose pieces published between 1900 and Yeats's death in January 1939 and benefits from the notes and emendations of Yeats scholar Colton Johnson. The pieces collected here are occasional, and they reflect the many interests and engagements of Yeats in his maturity. No longer a reviewer or polemicist, Yeats is an international figure: a senator in the fledgling Irish state, a defining modern poet, a distinguished essayist. And here we have him writing -- with grace, wit, and passion -- on the state of Ireland in the world, on Irish language and Irish literature, on his artistic contemporaries, on the Abbey Theater, on divorce, on censorship, on his evolution as a poet and dramatist, on his own poetry.

Volume X also includes texts of ten radio programs Yeats broadcast between 1931 and 1937. This is not only the first collection but also the first printing of Yeats's radio work, which constitutes the largest previously uncollected body of his writings and possibly the most important to remain largely unstudied. Carefully assembled from manuscripts, typescripts, broadcast scripts, and fragmentary recordings, the programs range from a scripted interview on contemporary issues to elaborate stagings of his own and others' poetry. One of the radio programs is presented in an appendix complete with the commissioned musical score that set Yeats's poetry to music, Yeats's own emendations on the BBC broadcast script, and the diacritical notes with which the broadcast reader indicated Yeats's interpretive instructions.

Here, then, is seasoned Yeats, writing and speaking vigorously and with keen personal insight about the modern age and his place in it.

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Book Description
William Butler Yeats was not only one of the most beloved and honored poets of this century. Playwright, essayist, theatrical impresario, occultist, politician, famously hapless lover--he was also one of the most colorful and complex. Astonishingly, no full biography of Yeats has appeared in many years. Now, Keith Alldritt gives us a lively telling of Yeats's story that puts the poet in the context of his times, from the high Victorian era to the modernism of the thirties.

Alldritt reveals that Yeats was not just "the sensitive introvert who began as the mooning dreamer and after a lifetime seeking philosophical and hermetic wisdom, ended as the learned sage" that Yeats himself and his biographers would have us believe. He shows us a less familiar man: "a dedicated careerist, an ambitious man of determined self-interest, a seeker after social standing, and a combative man with a violent temper that sustained him in many nasty quarrels." Confrontational, scrappy, driven, he was deeply involved in both the political and literary issues of his day. He was instrumental in overturning the English domination of Irish literature and in researching and publishing books on Irish lore and fairy tales. He was the founder, with George Bernard Shaw, of the Irish Institute of Arts and Letters as well as the Abbey Theatre, where he refused to close down Synge's inflammatory play The Playboy of the Western World, despite riots in the street. During his tenure as senator in the Irish Parliament, he fought the Catholic divorce laws. At every level, Alldritt shows us a poet engaged in the world.

Yeats's long, passionate, and physically unrequited love affair with the beautiful Irish nationalist Maud Gonne, which led to some of his most poignant poetry, is brought vividly to life. Also covered in some detail are Yeats's numerous love affairs in the years before his death. Though condoned by his wife, they have not been explored in previous biographies out of respect for her feelings.

Another aspect of Yeats not generally appreciated is his involvement with literary movements outside Ireland and England. He wrote reviews for the Boston Globe; lectured regularly throughout the United States; and spent much time in France, where he was influenced by the symbolist poets, and in Italy, where he joined the Rapallo group led by the quixotic Ezra Pound.    

In his years of research, Alldritt visited libraries worldwide. He was given special access to Yeats's private papers in the National Library of Ireland and interviewed many people who knew or are knowledgeable about Yeats, most notably Yeats's daughter, Anne.

Yeats has been called "the greatest poetic imagination of our century." Now Keith Alldritt reveals another facet of his extraordinary persona.

William Butler Yeats was a master craftsman, and one of his most skillful constructs was his own image. He wished to be remembered, above all, as an Irishman and a poet; as a man whose nature had been determined by the almost magical qualities of his childhood in Sligo and whose character had been shaped by the influence of admirable men. There is truth in this depiction of himself, but it is a partial truth only.

In this account, I attempt to go beyond his interior world and to evoke and do justice to those individuals and external forces which in their turn made up part of the dialectic of Yeats's life. Yeats lived at a time of profound changes for the Western world from the high Victorianism of the late 1800s to the advent of modernism in the 1930s. I have attempted to offer a strong sense of Yeats in his social and historical context--to show that an important side of his genius was his deep and often manipulative relationship with the turbulent life around him as with his turbulent life within. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

The cheapest way to obtain Yeats' best poems in hardcover!
This book is for the classic Yeats reader who wants a greatest hits book, without the exhausting detail of the author's every waking moment.Expertly categorized, his great poems are woven into this book, withexcellent type and font that is very readable.The cover is also elegantlydesigned (you can see it online).

Misleading Title!!
Obviously, it is the selection and not the poetry itself which merits thelow rating. I ordered this text after consulting Books in Print;"Selected Poems" seems reasonable enough. In fact, the poemscover only the first half of Yeats's career, and thus many of his finestworks are not represented. Caveat emptor! ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Pretty wicken little plays!
Wow, the Yeats-as-playwright is compelling. Unlike his poetry, it's very modern in its approach, but it will leave you wondering what you were supposed to come away with - and perhaps that is enough! ... Read more

Product Description
The original previously unpublished text of the Memoirs and the Journal - First American Edition 1973, Fourth Printing 1977 ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

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." ... Read more

Amazon.com Audiobook Review
Yeats is truly the voice of old Ireland. His poetry is steeped in Irish myth and legend; his characters inhabit a world of magic, great beauty, and great sadness. This collection of 85 poems, including "The White Birds," "The Song of Wandering Aengus," and "To Ireland in the Coming Times," reflects Yeats's range of emotion--joy and regret, passion and lost love, dreams and dashed hopes. Beautifully read by an all-star cast, including Gabriel Byrne, Julian Sands, Colm Meaney, and Minnie Driver, this collection is both an excellent introduction to Yeats's work and a treat for his longtime fans. (Running time: 1 hour, 1 cassette) --C.B. Delaney ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

For those who've forgotten they are Irish
It is impossible to say who of the tremendous artists on this recording does the greatest honor to Yeats' words and intentions. Let us merely say it is the sort of contest which only the listener wins, especially if he or she has even one Emerald Isle gene in his or her make-up.

Lyrical
This is a wonderful collection of poetry.The readers contribute so much emotion to their reading.The listener can hear the music of Ireland in each voice.Every time I listen to this, I hear something new.Some of the poems included are: Stolen Child; The Indian to his Love; The Cloak, the Boat and the Shoes and The Sad Shepherd.This has brought many hours of relaxation and beauty to my evenings.I highly recommend this tape.

beautiful
The variety of readers makes Yeats poetry come tolife.If you like to chill in the car, this one is for you. ... Read more

Book Description
The first edition of W. B. Yeats's The Tower appeared in bookstores in London on Valentine's Day, 1928. His English publisher printed just 2,000 copies of this slender volume of twenty-one poems, priced at six shillings. The book was immediately embraced by book buyers and critics alike, and it quickly became a bestseller.

Subsequent versions of the volume made various changes throughout, but this Scribner facsimile edition reproduces exactly that seminal first edition as it reached its earliest audience in 1928, adding an introduction and notes by esteemed Yeats scholar Richard J. Finneran.

Written between 1912 and 1927, these poems ("Sailing to Byzantium," "Leda and the Swan," and "Among School Children" among them) are today considered some of the best and most famous in the entire Yeats canon. As Virginia Woolf declared in her unsigned review of this collection, "Mr. Yeats has never written more exactly and more passionately."Download Description
Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing, But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make Of hammered gold and gold enamelling To keep a drowsy Emperor awake; Or set upon a golden bough to sing To lords and ladies of Byzantium Of what is past, or passing, or to come. ... Read more