Emblems Of Adversity

Examines the life and writings of William Butler Yeats, including a biographical sketch, detailed synopses of his works, social and historical influences, and more.

Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney, author of nine collections of poetry and three volumes of influential essays, is regarded by many as the greatest Irish poet since Yeats. Passage to the Center is the most comprehensive critical treatment to date on Heaney's poetry and the first to study Heaney's body of work up to Seeing Things and The Spirit Level. It is also the first to examine the poems from the perspective of religion, one of Heaney's guiding preoccupations. According to Tobin, the growth of Heaney's poetry may be charted through the recurrent figure of "the center," a key image in the relationship that evolved over time between the poet and his inherited place, an evolution that involved the continual re-evaluation and re-vision of imaginative boundaries. In a way that previous studies have not, Tobin's work examines Heaney's poetry in the context of modernist and postmodernist concerns about the desacralizing of civilization and provides a challenging engagement with the work of a living master.

Poetry.

The essays collected in Emblems of Adversity: Essays on the Aesthetics of Politics in W. B. Yeats and Others hinge on the question of political articulation in Yeats’s poetry. Politics and history are paramount to our understanding of the Yeatsian poetic text. They are inextricable from the poet's aesthetic philosophy. Yet politics manifests itself in a complex and complicated form in his work. It articulates itself both consciously and unconsciously. It is at once latent and manifest; appropriated and yet rejected; unambiguously announced in the title but immediately muffled in the corpus. Additionally, political articulation in Yeats’s poetry is multifarious, insofar as the biographical, the national and the historical are not only politicized but most often envisioned—apocalyptically—as emblems of adversity. To put it differently, ageing, Irish politics and modernity are synonymous with a Time transmogrifying “ancestral houses” into “ruins”—a Time “half dead at the top.” Self, Ireland and history are intermeshed in Yeats’s symbolism. They are inseparable from his worldview. His rage against ageing most often culminates in raging about the age—both modernity and Irish current reality. These essays trace Yeats’s aestheticization of politics right from the beginning of his poetic career, from his early pastoral innocence to the later modernist experience. Some of them examine Yeats comparatively with other modernists.

The fundamental difference between rhetoric and poetry, according to Yeats, is that rhetoric is the expression of ones quarrels with others while poetry is the expression of ones quarrel with oneself. Through exquisite attention to outer and inner forms, Vendler explores the most inventive reaches of the poets mind.

Table of contents

What are the means available to poetry to address crisis and how can both poets and critics meet the conflicts and challenges they face? This collection of essays addresses poetic and critical responses to the various crises encountered by contemporary writers and our society, from the Holocaust to the ecological crisis.

In Befitting Emblems of Adversity, David Gardiner investigates the various national contexts in which Edmund Spenser's poetic project has been interpreted and represented by modern Irish poets, from the colonial context of Elizabethan Ireland to Yeats's use of Spenser as an aesthetic andpolitical model to John Montague's reassessment of the reciprocal definitions of the poet and the nation through reference to Spenser. Gardiner also includes analysis of Spenser's influence on Northern Irish poets. And an afterword on the work of Thomas McCarthy, Sean Dunne, and Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, and others discusses how Montague's reinterpretation of Spenser influenced this most recent generation of Irish poets.