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.
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
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
Katharine Tynan
W. B. Yeats
wrote to her of this book: You have the gift to describe many people with sympathy and even with admiration and yet to leave them their distinct characters.
Hinkson, Pamela. “The Friendship of Yeats and Katharine Tynan, II: Later Days of the Irish Literary Movement”. The Fortnightly, No. 1043 n.s., pp. 323-36.
331
Literary responses
Michael Field
Writing in The Bookman, William Butler Yeats
called this collection suggestive and thoroughly unsatisfactory.
Yeats, W. B. Uncollected Prose by W.B. Yeats. Editors Frayne, John P. and Colton Johnson, Columbia University Press.
225
He questioned Field's poetic approach. They have poetic feeling and imagination in abundance, he wrote, and yet they have...
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...
Literary responses
James Joyce
Though Joyce often railed against hisnative city, he felt that depicting it made him a pioneer. Dublin, he wrote, was second only to London among British cities and was three times the size of Venice:...
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
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.
Badeni, June. The Slender Tree: A Life of Alice Meynell. Tabb House.
Yeats
said, I have read in a paper called The Egoist certain chapters of a new novel, a disguised autobiography, which increases my conviction that he is the most remarkable new talent in Ireland today...
Literary responses
Dorothy Wellesley
Yeats
admired this volume for its explorations of the picturesque, for its love . . . for undisturbed Nature, a hatred for the abstract, the mechanical, the invented, and for an intensity which he saw...
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
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.
