Words Alone
Subtitle: Yeats and His Inheritances
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2011
Language: eng
Number of pages: 226
ISBN-13: 9780199592166
Subjects: Yeats, w. b. (william butler), 1865-1939; English literature, irish authors, history and criticism
Description: "W.B. Yeats is usually seen as a great innovator whose extraordinary imagination transformed modern Irish literature, making a decisive break with the past. But what made him the remarkable writer he was? In this book, drawn from the 2009 Clark Lectures, Yeats's prize-winning biographer R.F. Foster returns to the rich seed-bed of nineteenth-century Irish literature to reveal the influences that shaped the poet's unique and powerful voice: romantic history of the Young Ireland movement, the occult and supernatural novels of Sheridan LeFanu, William Carleton's 'peasant fictions', fairy-lore, and folktale collections. The young Yeats consciously mined these traditions and was, Foster shows, an inheritor as much as an inventor."--Jacket.