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
Literary responses Katharine Tynan
W. B. Yeats , to whom KT had sent a copy of this volume, wrote, you are at your best when you write as a mother and when you remember your old home and the...
Literary responses Edith Sitwell
This book made Yeats liken ES to Swift for her passion ennobled by intensity, by endurance, by wisdom.
qtd. in
Sitwell, Edith. Taken Care Of: An Autobiography. Hutchinson, 1965.
106
Her Times obituary called these poems Sitwell's The Waste Land, suggesting that despite her still...
Literary responses Augusta Gregory
The play was very well received, drawing large and enthusiastic audiences. From the beginning, critics recognized its hypnotic effect and its potential to stir audiences to violence. One reviewer, Stephen Gwynn , questioned whether such...
Literary responses Charlotte Mew
Marianne Moore was quoted on the dust-jacket: This collection is to me extraordinary—unforced, and masterly in a technical way, almost without exception. There are in the style traces of W. B. Yeats and Thomas Hardy
Literary responses Augusta Gregory
W. B. Yeats felt that she alone of the Abbey playwrights wrote out of a spirit of pure comedy, and laugh[ed] without bitterness and with no thought but to laugh.
qtd. in
Saddlemyer, Ann. In Defence of Lady Gregory, Playwright. Dufour Editions, 1966.
31
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 Kathleen Raine
KR longed vainly to be published by Eliot at Faber; by the time that she heard from Yeats 's daughter, years later, that he had first read her at the recommendation of Eliot , she...
Literary responses Emily Lawless
Though it was never entirely forgotten, Lawless's writing did not fit the assumptions about what Irish literature should be
Hansson, Heidi. Emily Lawless 1845-1913: Writing the Interspace. Cork University Press, 2007.
4
in the first half of the twentieth century, and she was largely excluded from the...
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
Yeats noted that by including Joyce here KT had helped launch his career: It has led to the publication of some of Joyce's fiction in a little London paper called the Egotist [sic] over which...
Literary responses Alice Meynell
This collection moved the Times Literary Supplement to declare that its delicacy—of scrupulousness, balance, fineness, skill—is as rare in life and in art as ever it was.
qtd. in
Badeni, June. The Slender Tree: A Life of Alice Meynell. Tabb House, 1981.
222-3
Dixon Scott wrote in the Liverpool Courier...
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.
qtd. in
Yeats, W. B., and Dorothy Wellesley. “Introduction”. Selections from the Poems of Dorothy Wellesley, Macmillan, 1936, p. vii - xv.
ix
The reader's...
Literary responses Katharine Tynan
KT found that her staunch support for Parnell after the divorce case was now punished with some damaging criticism of this biography.
Tynan, Katharine. Twenty-Five Years: Reminiscences. Smith, Elder, 1913.
382
Tynan, Katharine. The Middle Years. Constable, 1916.
66
The review in the anti-Parnellite National Press presented abuse of me...
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, 1982.
12-13, 113, 115
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...

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