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.
As an undergraduate Larkin was naturally still finding his voice. One poem dating from probably 1943 has its title and its lesbian topic from Charles Baudelaire
: Femmes Damnées. Larkin's poem of this title...
Textual Features
Emily Hickey
The collection contains, among other pieces, three narrative poems, one of which, The Ballad of Lady Ellen, shows the influence of William Butler Yeats
. Several sonnets here employ the Italian form. Sources note...
Textual Features
Philip Larkin
The title poem is a composite, comprising a Legend in the form of a ballad, and four songs positioned further and further northwards. The ballad opens: I saw three ships go sailing by. One sails...
Textual Features
Katharine Tynan
They show increasing awareness of time and time's passing: in this volume KT
expresses regret for having missed, by her absence in England, the last moments of some of her Irish friends' lives. Nearly all...
Residence
Sylvia Plath
SP
found that William Butler Yeats
's former flat in Fitzroy Road, London, was available for rent, and she moved into it with her children.
Hayman, Ronald. The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath. Heinemann.
During the same festival, MMG
said she found Yeats
intimidating because of the perfection of his poems, but that his influence has made Seamus Heaney
's poetry and hers possible: I feel that there is...
Reception
Augusta Gregory
Bernard Shaw
saw Lady Gregory as a born playwright . . . . doomed from the cradle to write for the stage, to break through every social obstacle to get to the stage, to refuse...
Reception
Katharine Tynan
At the start of her writing career, in 1885, KT
was revered as the next Catholic
woman poet to succeed Christina Rossetti
. She herself held firmly to this image even while her Parnellism and...
Reception
W. H. Auden
Auden later rejected September 1, 1939 in this collection as Yeats
ian and inflated: The unmentionable odour of death/ Offends the September night).
Auden, W. H. “September 1, 1939”. Poets.org: from the Academy of American Poets: Auden.
under Auden: September 1, 1939
It is not present in his...
Reception
Dorothy Wellesley
W. B. Yeats
, then aged seventy, discovered DW
's writing in 1935 when he was ill in bed and was at work on The Oxford Book of Modern Verse. He was feeling disillusioned...
Reception
Edith Somerville
She had been a founding member of the Academy at its inception by Yeats
in 1932.
Collis, Maurice. Somerville and Ross: A Biography. Faber and Faber.
252-3
Reception
May Laffan
For such a short piece this has been reviewed extensively; its popularity endured until the end of the nineteenth century. The Spectator said that [n]o work of fiction that we have seen for a long...
Reception
Anna Wickham
Thanks to Untermeyer and to British poet and anthologist John Gawsworth
, by the 1930s AW
's poetry was widely anthologised, making her often as well represented as respected male poets such as Lawrence
,...
