The Critical Thought of W. B. Yeats

Abstract

This book focuses on W. B. Yeats’s critical writings, an aspect of his oeuvre which has been given limited treatment so far. It traces his critical work from his earliest articles, through to his occult treatises, and all the way to his last pamphlets, in which he sought to delineate the idea of a literary culture: a community of people willing to credit poetry with the central role in imagining and organising social praxis throughout society. The chapters of this study investigate the contexts in which Yeats’s thought developed, his many disputes over the shape of Irish cultural politics, the future of poetry and the place literature occupies in the world. What transpires is an image of Yeats who is strung between the impulses of faith in the existence of a supernatural order and ironic scepticism as to the possibility of ever capturing that order in language. This study is distinguished by its grounding of Yeats's critical agenda in a broader context through textual analysis. In addition, it organises and systematises his conceptions of poetry and its social role through its approach to his criticism as a fully-fledged area of his artistic practice. Acknowledgements; Contents; Abbreviations; 1 Introduction; 2 Popular Audiences and Poetical Culture; The Native Strain; The Lie, the Text and Society; 3 'Divine Essences' in an Earthly Language: Ideas of Good and Evil; Divergent Paths; Controversy and 'the Deepening Shades'; En-chanted Symbolist; 4 Cutting the Irish Agate; Life's Circumstances; Fall of the Society of Imagination; Revival of Language; Life, not Morality; Poet Among Masks; 5 Per Amica Silentia Lunae: An Intertwining of Paths; Essay as Prose Poem; Treatise on Poetry; Exploring Dimensions of Love: Iseult Gonne An Antithetical Moment6 Dichotomies Multiplied: A Vision; Binary on Binary Mirrored; Antithetical Freedom in a Primary World; 7 The Modern World and Yeats's Discontents; The Rise and Fall of the Blueshirt Promise; Life's Sections; The Drama of the Soul and the Oxford Book of Modern Verse; The Irish Difference: Essays 1931-1936; 8 Searching for Completion: 'On Modern Poetry' and 'A General Introduction for My Work'; Broadcasting Poetry; Looking Back: 'General Introduction for My Work'; 9 Da Capo al Fine: He the Great Gazebo Built(?); Works Cited; Name Index; Subject Index.