Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
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.
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...
During the last twenty years of her life, she became increasingly passionate about Irish politics and about her own Irish heritage. She closely followed news of the Easter Rising in Dublin, in 1916 and...
Intertextuality and Influence
Naomi Mitchison
The action takes place among Celtic tribes between 58 and 51 BC (with a coda set five years later). It opens in what is now the Auvergne, newly invaded and occupied by the Roman...
Friends, Associates
Alice Meynell
Following her early conquest of Tennyson
, AM
went on to develop a large circle of literary acquaintances. Callers on the Meynells at Palace Court included Irish writer Katharine Tynan
, Aubrey Beardsley
(while he...
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.
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
Textual Production
Medbh McGuckian
MMG
published with Cranagh Press
a book of criticism cheekily titled with a misquotation of Yeats
: Horsepower Pass By: A Study of the Car in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney.
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Medbh McGuckian
This collection is much concerned with women's experience. MMG
both follows and diverges from W. B. Yeats
in writing prayers for her daughter.
Textual Production
Mary McCarthy
The year after The Oasis, MMC
published a volume of short stories, Cast a Cold Eye. Her choice of title (from the close of Yeats
's Under Ben Bulben: Cast a cold...
Textual Features
Dora Marsden
Marsden was neither unaware nor entirely appreciative of Pound's intellectual programme or his professional ethics. She told Weaver
in a letter of November 1913 (after the journal had again been relaunched with a new name)...
Textual Production
Florence Marryat
FM
published another novel, entitled Fighting the Air, dedicated in memory of an Irish welcome
Marryat, Florence. Fighting the Air. B. Tauchnitz.
