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 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.
222-3
Dixon Scott wrote in the Liverpool Courier...
Literary responses James Joyce
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 Rosamund Marriott Watson
William Archer included RMW alongside A. E. Housman , Rudyard Kipling , Alice Meynell , E. Nesbit , and William Butler Yeats in Poets of the Younger Generation (1902).
Archer, William. Poets of the Younger Generation. John Lane, Bodley Head.
vii-viii
Her diction is pure, he...
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.
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 Edith Sitwell
This book made Yeats liken ES to Swift for her passion ennobled by intensity, by endurance, by wisdom.
Sitwell, Edith. Taken Care Of: An Autobiography. Hutchinson.
106
Her Times obituary called these poems Sitwell's The Waste Land, suggesting that despite her still...
Literary responses Augusta Gregory
The collection was widely admired when it first appeared in print. Yeats praised it in his preface as the best book that has come out of Ireland in my time
McDiarmid, Lucy et al. “Introduction, Notes, and Bibliography”. Selected Writings, Penguin, pp. xi - xliv, 525.
xxviii
and used it as...
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...
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 Augusta Gregory
W. B. Yeats 's introduction, 1904, said the stories were so full of power, and set in a world so fluctuating and dreamlike, that nothing can hold them from being all that the heart desires....
Literary responses Edna O'Brien
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...

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