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.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Literary responses Wendy Cope
Reviewer Andrew O'Hagan , however, applies a withering pen to WC in a tirade about a general style of anthology which is, he says, frivolous or aimed at the lifestyle or selfhelp markets. His complaint...
Literary responses Eva Gore-Booth
The volume was well-received by EGB 's contemporaries. W. B. Yeats wrote to her: I think it is full of poetic feeling and has great promise. . . . Weariness is really most imaginative and...
Literary responses Rosamund Marriott Watson
William Archer included RMW alongside A. E. Housman , Rudyard Kipling , Alice Meynell , E. Nesbit , and William Butler Yeats in Poets of the Younger Generation (1902).
Archer, William. Poets of the Younger Generation. John Lane, Bodley Head.
vii-viii
Her diction is pure, he...
Literary responses Edith Sitwell
This book made Yeats liken ES to Swift for her passion ennobled by intensity, by endurance, by wisdom.
Sitwell, Edith. Taken Care Of: An Autobiography. Hutchinson.
106
Her Times obituary called these poems Sitwell's The Waste Land, suggesting that despite her still...
Literary responses Augusta Gregory
The collection was widely admired when it first appeared in print. Yeats praised it in his preface as the best book that has come out of Ireland in my time
McDiarmid, Lucy et al. “Introduction, Notes, and Bibliography”. Selected Writings, Penguin, pp. xi - xliv, 525.
xxviii
and used it as...
Literary responses Martin Ross
Most of the reviews were excellent, but the Westminster Gazette gave the book a furious tearing.
Collis, Maurice. Somerville and Ross: A Biography. Faber and Faber.
103
Just from excerpts quoted in reviews, W. B. Yeats judged the book to be very big.
Collis, Maurice. Somerville and Ross: A Biography. Faber and Faber.
129
Literary responses Teresa Deevy
The Belfast News-Letter reviewed this volume in February next year along with work by O'Casey , Yeats , and Lennox Robinson . The reviewer was impressed by different qualities in all of these, but judged...
Literary responses Augusta Gregory
W. B. Yeats 's introduction, 1904, said the stories were so full of power, and set in a world so fluctuating and dreamlike, that nothing can hold them from being all that the heart desires....
Literary responses Edna O'Brien
Jonathan Yardley , reviewing for the Washington Post, stressed O'Brien's brilliance and her nationality. If what you're looking for is a map of Ireland, the fiction of Edna O'Brien will do just fine. She...
Literary responses Katharine Tynan
Yeats reviewed this book for the Gael, the Irish Fireside Review, and Truth. He declared that in the finding [of] her nationality she has found also herself, and written many pages of...
Literary responses Dorothy Wellesley
Yeats 's introduction praised her for uniting a modern subject and vocabulary with traditional richness.
Yeats, W. B., and Dorothy Wellesley. “Introduction”. Selections from the Poems of Dorothy Wellesley, Macmillan, p. vii - xv.
x
As well as Horses, he particularly praised Matrix.
Literary responses Teresa Deevy
Lennox Robinson and Frank O'Connor remained strong supporters of TD 's stage writing, but W. B. Yeats felt she was wrong not to accept more help with revision. A study of her plays by John Jordan
Literary responses Katharine Tynan
In his review for the Evening Herald, W. B. Yeats judged that this volume was well nigh in all things a thoroughly Irish book, springing straight from the Celtic mind and pouring itself out...
Literary responses Seamus Heaney
Motion mentions the famous comparison of Heaney with Yeats , and observes that they shared a commitment to the matter of Ireland, but that Heaney eschews Yeats's cloudy symbols for an investment in the...
Literary responses John Millington Synge
The first audiences hated what they perceived as the scandalously negative portrayal of Irish character. Actresses on stage in their shifts or undergarments were felt to be indelicate and damaging to national pride.
Benson, Eugene. J. M. Synge. Macmillan.
12-13, 113, 115

Timeline

No timeline events available.

Texts

No bibliographical results available.