Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
W. B. Yeats
-
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.
She had the dining room at Penns decorated by Vanessa Bell
and Duncan Grant
. They did three big wall panels each, plus designing furniture. The work was finished in 1931.
Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Editors Nicolson, Nigel and Joanne Trautmann, Hogarth Press.
4: 156
While not...
Family and Intimate relationships
Dorothy Wellesley
DW
's association with Yeats
, which lasted only the last three and a half years of his life, is treated by some commentators as a love-affair.
Tóibín, Colm. “A Djinn speaks”. London Review of Books, pp. 19-24.
24
Friends, Associates
Dorothy Wellesley
She and Yeats
then spent Christmas Day and many evenings together. She records in her autobiography her visits on the days before his death on 28 January 1939, and some of his last sayings. She...
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...
Anthologization
Dorothy Wellesley
Horses, having gone forward into Poems of Ten Years, 1924-1934, was selected by W. B. Yeats
for The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1935, and by Philip Larkin
for The Oxford Book...
Literary responses
Dorothy Wellesley
During this correspondence Yeats
wrote to her expressing the highest opinion of her work, even when he was most earnestly bent on changing it.
Literary responses
Dorothy Wellesley
Horses did a great deal to ensure DW
's continuing reputation. Yeats
particularly praised the lines on the wild grey asses fleet / With stripe from head to tail, and moderate ears.
Yeats, W. B., and Dorothy Wellesley. “Introduction”. Selections from the Poems of Dorothy Wellesley, Macmillan, p. vii - xv.
ix
The reader's...
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...
Literary responses
Dorothy Wellesley
Yeats
later called this a long meditation, perhaps the most moving philosophic poem of our time. He found it moving precisely because its wisdom, like that of the sphinx, was animal below the waist.Its...
Literary responses
Dorothy Wellesley
Yeats
found and valued in DW
's work both descriptive genius
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
and passionate precision.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Sackville-West
's considered judgement was that Wellesley was undisciplined, and that the philosophic freight which Yeats admired in her work...
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.
Archer, William. Poets of the Younger Generation. John Lane, Bodley Head.
vii-viii
Her diction is pure, he...
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.
