W. B. Yeats

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Standard Name: Yeats, W. B.
Used Form: William Butler Yeats
Used Form: Willie Yeats
WBY , who began publishing well before the end of the nineteenth century, is regarded as one of the most important twentieth-century poets in English, and one of the most international of Irish writers. He was early involved in the Irish Literary Revival, and wrote early, highly romantic lyrics on Celtic and fairy themes. Later he made poetry out of the search for a poetic language. Some of his later work is affected by his interest in the occult.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Travel John Millington Synge
After January 1895, Paris became Synge's most frequent destination and then his part-time home, though he also spent time studying in Rome and Florence. It was in Paris that he first met William Butler Yeats
Travel Dorothy Wellesley
DW rented the villa La Bastide near Beaulieu sur Mer in the south of France; Yeats was staying nearby with his wife, apparently restored to health after serious illness.
Wellesley, Dorothy. Far Have I Travelled. James Barrie.
165
Travel Muriel Box
During a hectic working life MB had few holidays. She and her husband took a cruise in the Mediterranean in summer 1948, and were at Nice to see the body of W. B. Yeats shipped...
Travel John Millington Synge
JMS arrived to spend six weeks on the Aran Islands off the west coast of Ireland, a destination recommended to him by William Butler Yeats . It was the first of five visits.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Saddlemyer, Ann. “Introduction and Chronology”. The Collected Letters of John Millington Synge, Oxford University Press, p. ix - xxvi.
xxii
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Dorothy Wellesley
The basic organization of Deserted House: Poem Sequence goes forward unaltered from its form as a separate volume, but Horses strangely becomes the last item in Trilogy II: Wine, and both Fire and Matrix...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Augusta Webster
During her tenure she encountered the very best and worst of late Victorian poetry. Her published reviews, which critic Marysa Demoor characterises as expressing a hesitant modernism,
Demoor, Marysa. “Women Poets as Critics in the <span data-tei-ns-tag="tei_title" data-tei-title-lvl=‘j’>Athenæum</span>: Ungendered Anonymity Unmasked”. Nineteenth-Century Prose, Vol.
24
, No. 1, pp. 51-71.
61
included appraisals of Robert Bridges ,...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Ella Hepworth Dixon
In a chapter devoted to Some Women Writers she praises, among others, Sheila Kaye-Smith , Margaret Kennedy (particularly for The Constant Nymph), Elizabeth von Arnim , and Violet Hunt . Authors who receive whole...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Anne Stevenson
Here ASargues that change is time's one permanent condition, that it continually transforms the present into the past at the very moment it opens the future to further change. Quoting from her own The...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Katharine Tynan
This volume runs from her youth up to Charles Stewart Parnell 's death in 1891, the closing of an important historical and personal chapter. She spends considerable time on her relationship with her father ...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Mary Elizabeth Coleridge
The volume includes literary criticism on works by Richard Watson Dixon and William Butler Yeats . The memoir The Drawing-Room recalls Robert Browning 's visit to MEC 's childhood home. Recollections of Mrs. Fanny Kemble
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Nina Hamnett
This book opens in 1926, with the author considerably bewildered by [her] somewhat disordered life since [her] return to England,
Hamnett, Nina. Is She a Lady? A Problem in Autobiography. Allan Wingate.
38
and the later course of the book remains disordered, offering the same flow of...
Textual Production Dorothy Wellesley
On this date he received by post a ballad by her, a reverie upon the grave of a trio of lovers, possibly dating from or inspired by his stay at Penns the previous month. This...
Textual Production Sylvia Townsend Warner
STW began writing poetry as a member of a group called the New Elizabethans, centred in Oxford and including Richard Hughes , Roy Campbell , and Ivor Gurney . Yeats was also a sympathiser.
Rattenbury, Arnold. “How the sanity of poets can be edited away”. London Review of Books, pp. 15-19.
17-18
Textual Production Anna Letitia Barbauld
ALB published her longest poem, a controversial and important analysis of the current state of the nation, of recent history, politics, and war: Eighteen Hundred and Eleven.
As precedent for titling a poem about...
Textual Production Florence Farr
FF published The Music of Speech, a detailed account of the technique she developed in collaboration with W. B. Yeats for reading poetry set to music.
Farr, Florence. The Music of Speech. Elkin Mathews.
title-page
TLS Centenary Archive Centenary Archive [1902-2012]. http://www.gale.com/c/the-times-literary-supplement-historical-archive.
376 (25 March 1909): 119

Timeline

1890: The year following Irish nationalist Ellen...

Women writers item

1890

The year following Irish nationalist Ellen O'Leary 's death from breast cancer on 15 October 1889, her Lays of Country, Home and Friends (many of them political) were collected and published.

December 1891: William Butler Yeats established (in London)...

Writing climate item

December 1891

William Butler Yeats established (in London) the Irish Literary Society ; the National Literary Society at Dublin followed the next year.

By April 1894: English theatre patron Annie Horniman funded...

Writing climate item

By April 1894

English theatre patron Annie Horniman funded a repertory season at the Avenue Theatre (later the Avenue Playhouse), London which concentrated on the new drama.

By earlier 1903: Elizabeth and Lily (or Susan Mary) Yeats...

Writing climate item

By earlier 1903

Elizabeth and Lily (or Susan Mary) Yeats established the Dun Emer Press in association with Evelyn Gleeson , manager of Dun Emer Industries in Dundrum, near Dublin.
Some sources suggest that the press...

By earlier 1903: Elizabeth and Lily (or Susan Mary) Yeats...

Writing climate item

By earlier 1903

Elizabeth and Lily (or Susan Mary) Yeats established the Dun Emer Press in association with Evelyn Gleeson , manager of Dun Emer Industries in Dundrum, near Dublin.
Some sources suggest that the press...

1908: The Cuala Press of Dublin published its first...

Writing climate item

1908

The Cuala Press of Dublin published its first two titles; it was the successor to the Dun Emer Press , founded by Elizabeth and Lily Yeats , sisters of the poet .

3 August 1916: In the aftermath of the Easter Rising, Irish...

National or international item

3 August 1916

In the aftermath of the Easter Rising, Irish nationalist Roger Casement , formerly Sir Roger, was executed for treason at Pentonville Prison in London for attempting to smuggle a shipment of German arms to Ireland.

8 February 1932: Count Geoffrey Wladislas Vaile Potocki of...

Writing climate item

8 February 1932

Count Geoffrey Wladislas Vaile Potocki of Montalk went to trial (and was later convicted) for obscene libel for having tried to get printed for private circulation five short poems.

1937: Margot Ruddock published The Lemon Tree,...

Women writers item

1937

Margot Ruddock published The Lemon Tree, a collection of her poetry edited by W. B. Yeats .

By June 1958: The Nigerian Chinua Achebe published his...

Writing climate item

By June 1958

The Nigerian Chinua Achebe published his first and still most famous novel, Things Fall Apart (titled from W. B. Yeats ).

By July 1964: Canadian writer Jane Rule issued in Canada...

Writing climate item

By July 1964

Canadian writer Jane Rule issued in Canada and England her best-known novel, Desert of the Heart, whose title alludes to W. H. Auden 's poem on the death of Yeats .

1970: Roger McHugh edited a collection of letters...

Women writers item

1970

Roger McHugh edited a collection of letters between W. B. Yeats and Margot Ruddock entitled Ah, Sweet Dancer.

Texts

Yeats, W. B. A Vision. Privately printed for subscribers only by T. Werner Laurie, 1925.
Yeats, W. B. A Vision. Macmillan, 1962.
Yeats, W. B. “Foreword”. Letters on Poetry from W.B. Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley, edited by Dorothy Wellesley, Oxford University Press, 1964, p. v.
Yeats, W. B. Four Plays for Dancers. Macmillan Co., 1921.
Yeats, W. B. In the Seven Woods. Dun Emer Press, 1903.
Yeats, W. B., and Dorothy Wellesley. “Introduction”. Selections from the Poems of Dorothy Wellesley, Macmillan, 1936, p. vii - xv.
Raine, Kathleen, and W. B. Yeats. “Introduction”. Letters on Poetry from W.B. Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley, edited by Dorothy Wellesley and Dorothy Wellesley, Oxford University Press, 1964, p. ix - xiii.
Yeats, W. B. Last Poems and Two Plays. Cuala Press, 1939.
Yeats, W. B. Letters on Poetry from W.B. Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley. Editor Wellesley, Dorothy, Oxford University Press, 1940.
Yeats, W. B. Letters on Poetry from W.B. Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley. Editor Wellesley, Dorothy, Oxford University Press, 1964.
Yeats, W. B. Letters to Katharine Tynan. Editor McHugh, Roger, Clonmore and Reynolds, 1953.
Yeats, W. B. Michael Robartes and the Dancer. Cuala Press, 1920.
Yeats, W. B. On Baile’s Strand. Maunsel and Co., 1905.
Tynan, Katharine et al., editors. Poems and Ballads of Young Ireland. M. H. Gill and Son, 1888.
Wellesley, Dorothy, and W. B. Yeats. Selections from the Poems of Dorothy Wellesley. Macmillan, 1936.
Yeats, W. B. The Collected Works in Verse and Prose of William Butler Yeats. Shakespeare Head Press; Chapman and Hall, 1908.
Yeats, W. B. The Countess Cathleen. T. F. Unwin, 1899.
Yeats, W. B. The Countess Kathleen. T. Fisher Unwin, 1892.
Gonne, Maud, and W. B. Yeats. The Gonne–Yeats Letters 1893–1938. Editors White, Anna MacBride and A. Norman Jeffares, Hutchinson, 1992.
Yeats, W. B. The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892-1935. Oxford University Press, 1936.
Yeats, W. B. The Tower. Macmillan, 1928.
Yeats, W. B., and Augusta Gregory. The Unicorn from the Stars, and Other Plays. Macmillan, 1908.
Yeats, W. B. The Wanderings of Oisin, and Other Poems. Paul Trench, 1889.
Yeats, W. B. The Wild Swans at Coole. Cuala Press, 1917.
Yeats, W. B. The Winding Stair and Other Poems. Macmillan and Co Ltd., 1933.