Essays & Introductions

by W.B. Yeats

Essays & Introductions YB Yeats, New

Genres: Literary Criticism, Essays, Irish Literature, Ireland, Literature, Nonfiction

544 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1961

About the author

William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and dramatist, and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years Yeats served as an Irish Senator for two terms. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival, and along with Lady Gregory and Edward Martyn founded the Abbey Theatre, serving as its chief during its early years. In 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for what the Nobel Committee described as "inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation." He was the first Irishman so honored. Yeats is generally considered one of the few writers who completed their greatest works after being awarded the Nobel Prize; such works include The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1929).

Yeats was born and educated in Dublin but spent his childhood in County Sligo. He studied poetry in his youth, and from an early age was fascinated by both Irish legends and the occult. Those topics feature in the first phase of his work, which lasted roughly until the turn of the century. His earliest volume of verse was published in 1889, and those slow paced and lyrical poems display debts to Edmund Spenser and Percy Bysshe Shelley, as well as to the Pre-Raphaelite poets. From 1900, Yeats' poetry grew more physical and realistic. He largely renounced the transcendental beliefs of his youth, though he remained preoccupied with physical and spiritual masks, as well as with cyclical theories of life.
--from Wikipedia

Reviews

[Alan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like T.S. Eliot's "The Sacred Wood" (1920), W.B. Yeats's "General Introduction for All my Work" (1937) remains essential reading. (Curious both are bi-initialed names; can't do this with the two prior famous Williams, WW and Shake, neither sporting a middle name.) Want an introduction to Dante? Read T.S. To Spenser? Read W.B.
"I tried to make the language of poetry coincide with that of passionate, normal speech" and in this English poetry has followed him, he asserts (521). "It was a long time before I had made a language to my liking" but about 1917 he discovered he needed, not as Wordsworth, words in common use, but "a powerful and passionate syntax." "I would have poetry turn its back on all that modish curiosity, psychology.." (530).
Love his quoting Lady Gregory's rejection of a play in the modern manner sent to the Abbey Theatre,"'Tragedy must be a joy to the man who dies.' neither scholars nor the populace have sung or read anything generation after generation because of its pain." Marvelously appropriate to plays in our time (2005-2017), so often deliberately depressing. Lady Gregory and Yeats support the Shakespeare scholar Hugh Richmond* who questions new plays and old tragedies that are performed to depress, and not exhilarate (Intro to Shakespeare's Tragedies Reviewed 2015).
Wonderful essays on Spenser, Shelley (especially the philosophy imbedded in his poetry--Yeats arguing that to last, philosophy must be embedded in poetry), and Berkeley--whose attempt to establish a Trinity College mission in Bermuda, a college for Native Americans, impinges on my residence, since I live about 20 miles from Berkeley's saltbox house near Newport, RI. Yeats notes Berkeley's Bermuda project had "a learned city so carefully mapped out, a steeple in the centre"; as for the Indian students, "He that cannot live must dream. Did tar-water, a cure-all learnt from American Indians, suggest though he could not quiet men's minds he might give their bodies respite…"(399). From this I learned the Native source of the tar shampoo my dermatologist recommended for me.

* I had the honor of editing Richmond's last book, "Shakespeare's Tragedies Reviewed" for Peter Lang Press. (See my review.)

[Annabelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

I used to have a hard time telling Yeats and Keats apart. My introduction to John Keats came from an inscription on a little notebook when I was eight ("Beauty is truth, truth beauty"), decades away from discovering his sublime Ode on a Grecian Urn. W.B. Yeats came into my periphery at fifteen, from a book which extolled the modern magicians of the early 20th century; a highlight was the showdown between Aleister Crowley and W.B. Yeats, both from the Order of the Golden Dawn. Further down the line I read Yeats's The Second Coming and agree with Fintan O'Toole's proposed Yeats Test: "The more quotable Yeats seems to commentators and politicians, the worse things are."

In some of his essays here, Yeats's evident attraction to the mystical and the esoteric are discernible, as he writes about visions prompted by an unnamed friend with whom he has "since quarrelled for sound reasons" (Crowley, perhaps?) and the friend's wife, and cultivated friendships and shared insights with Indian mystics such as Shri Purohit Swami. However, as early as the second chapter (Speaking to the Psaltery) I could feel I was in over my head, a sentiment felt all throughout my reading. Unfamiliar with the works of Edmund Spenser and his epic Faerie Queen ("all that for a song!", to quote Queen Elizabeth's adviser Lord Burleigh, upon hearing of the generous pension offered to Spenser by the Queen), William Blake, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, William Morris, J.M. Synge and on very limited acquaintanceship with that of Balzac's and Shakespeare's, I may only have understood some fifty percent of Yeats's articles. But here's the thing: whatever I did comprehend moved me, moved me strongly enough to want to read and learn further. And Yeats, writing in the early 1900s, speaks to me, and speaks for me when he bemoans how "The arts have failed; fewer people are interested in them every generation. The mere business of living, of making money, of amusing oneself, occupies people more and more, and makes them less and less capable of the difficult art of appreciation."

Three and a half stars (Goodreads doesn't do half stars).

[Ellen Frances · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book changed me. It introduced me to a new kind of intellectual spiritualism and deepened my love of both the Nobel Prize-winning Yeats and Blake. The essays included range from thoughts on the theater and art, to nature and alchemical spirituality as magic. Yeats also directly addresses the work of Blake, which served to deepen my understanding of both men. -- While Yeats's contributions to the literary world though his poetry are undeniable, I came to know him and respect him more broadly though this book.

[Chaz]

do you believe in magick?