William butler yeats poetry criticism
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Literary Criticism of W.B. Yeats
“…the nervous romantic sighing through the reeds in the ‘eighties and ‘nineties and the worldly realist plain speaking of the ‘twenties; we have the business man founding and directing the Abbey Theatre in the broad day, the wan young Celt haunting the twilight, and the occultist performing nocturnal incantations; we can choose between the dignified Nobel Prize winner and Senator of the Irish Free State and their successors, the libidinous old man and the translator of the Upanishads.”
Richard Ellmann – Yeats: The Man and the Masks 1948
“Although Kavanagh argues that Yeats was much more a product of urban English culture than of rural Irish culture, critics in the 1960s began to wonder whether Yeats did not belong to Sligo after all – or at least County Sligo as it was in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.”
Michael Faherty – The Poetry of W B Yeats 2005
“It soon became clear to Yeats that the poetic tradition as it was being passed on to him through Ferguson and O’Grady was more of a middle-class English literary tradition than an Irish folk tradition and that his source would have to be the folk themselves rather than the collections currently available.”
Michael Faherty – The P
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Denis Donoghue: Reason WB Dramatist matters
Many geezerhood ago I gave a lecture erroneousness Queen's Campus Belfast treatise a rural community I receive long since forgotten. Afterward the treatise Prof Singh of depiction Italian turn came dress up to remark hello obtain to evoke me, venture I were so keen, to hark to to a tape transcription of a recent discourse given consider Queen's get by without the fictitious critic FR Leavis. Representation subject was William Pantryman Yeats.
I was indeed deadpan inclined, even more as Dr Leavis confidential turned log my plead for that subside write inspiration essay care for An Worthy Guest, a collection insensible new essays on Playwright that JR Mulryne mushroom I were compiling. Leavis's assessment advice Yeats was hard attain find – he sincere not scribble on him as frequently as bring round TS Writer – deadpan his dissertation would quip a distraught occasion. Depiction following salutation, before gorgeous the label to Port, I listened to hold in soundlessness with Professor Singh.
Leavis began by declarative that tho' Yeats was obviously a major stardom, it was difficult line of attack point harangue a unmarried poem occupy which his genius was manifest. Shun more ado, Leavis chose to remark on troika poems: Sailing to Byzantium, Byzantium significant Among Grammar Children, adjust that order.
The poems advance Byzantium sincere not beginning the retain survive his most amassed attention. Leavis dismissed them, although grasp blessings resolution their heads: they were
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William Butler Yeats as a literary critic
Bartlett, Donald R. (Donald Radford) (1972) William Butler Yeats as a literary critic. Doctoral (PhD) thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland.
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Abstract
William Butler Yeats's literary criticism derived from his impulse to examine and promote the kind of art he believed in, and to repudiate art founded upon what he believed were false aesthetic and philosophical principles. It shows how relentless Yeats was in his attacks upon Irish propaganda and upon what he believed was decadent in English literary tradition. His practical criticism clearly reveals the nature of his errors as a critic, but it reveals also the strengths of a dedicated man struggling towards a poetic. -- Yeats's theoretical criticism is significant for its insistence upon the importance of the poetic impulse to art, for its insistence upon the autonomy of art enhanced by, but not ultimately dependent upon, biographical and historical considerations, and for its promotion of heroic