description: This volume, presenting 14 brilliant critical interpretations of Yeats, reveals not only the exciting variety of Yeats scholarship but, more importantly, the method and the nature of his unparalleled literary achievement.William Butler Yeats, winner of the Nobel prize for literature and Ireland's greatest lyric poet, combined in his poetry and plays the apparent opposites of dense symbolism and eloquent speech."If I can be sincere," Yeats said, "and make my language natural and without becoming discursive... I shall, if good luck or bad luck make my life interesting, be a great poet."In poetry that had private roots--but universal meaning--Yeats immortalized Maud Gonne, an ardent Irish nationalist and actress whom he for years loved hopelessly; Robert Gregory, the son of his friend and patroness Lady Augusta Gregory; and other members of a wide circle of artists, writers, and Irish patriots.Yet he recognized that the personal threatens always to decay into the sentimental. Through such traditional symbols as bird, rose, and cross, and through his "theory of the mask" he attempted to find a way toward objectivity. By setting up as his ideal a person temperamentally opposed to him (like Cuchulain, the reckless hero of ancient Irish mythology) gentle Yeats sought to make his poetry universal, pure, and cold.Yeats extended this theory of masks from persons to countries, and ultimately, in A Vision, worked out a cyclical theory of history tracing the pattern of all civilization as a constant warfare of antithetical forces.Drawing imagery and theme from such English writers as Blake and Shelley, exploring the whole range of both Eastern and Western occult literature--from Buddhism to Madame Blavatsky--Yeats is for the reader always eloquent, tantalizing, and provocative.
language: English
title: Yeats: A Collection of Critical Essays
titlecomplete: Yeats: A Collection of Critical Essays
ratings_count: 8
publisher: Prentice Hall