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.
W. B. Yeats
chose and edited for the publisher Macmillan
a volume of Selections from the Poems of Dorothy Wellesley, in which he sought to establish her reputation.
Wellesley, Dorothy, and W. B. Yeats. Selections from the Poems of Dorothy Wellesley. Macmillan.
vii
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.
Textual Production
Dorothy Wellesley
DW
began collaborative work with Yeats
: what started out as a ballad by herself, and became his ballad The Three Bushes and the songs (by lady, serving-maid, and lover) which went with it.
Jeffares, A. Norman. A New Commentary on the Poems of W.B. Yeats. Macmillan.
367
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...
Textual Production
Dorothy Wellesley
DW
edited Yeats
's letters to herself under the title of Letters on Poetry from W.B. Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley.
British Library Catalogue. http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?dscnt=0&tab=local_tab&dstmp=1489778087340&vid=BLVU1&mode=Basic&fromLo.
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...
Author summary
Dorothy Wellesley
DW
, writing in the earlier twentieth century, published a dozen volumes of poetry. She was also an editor of contemporary poetry, a letter-writer, critic, biographer and autobiographer. Her association first with the Hogarth Press
Friends, Associates
Dorothy Wellesley
DW
was about eleven when the great influence of the African imperialist George Goldie
(whose biography she was later to write) came into her life. When he answered yes to the question whether he had...
Leisure and Society
Dorothy Wellesley
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
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.
17-18
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
...