Our Secret Discipline

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.

Presents an examination of lyric form in the poetry of W. B. Yeats.

Vendler's masterful study of changes in style yields a new view of the interplay of moral, emotional, and intellectual forces in a poet's work. Throughout, Vendler reminds us that what distinguishes successful poetry is a mastery of language at all levels--including the rhythmic, the grammatical, and the graphic.

Memories of the man are shared by Seamus Heaney, Christopher Rush and Colin Smythe, who compiles a bibliography of Jeffares’s work. Terence Brown, Neil Corcoran, Warwick Gould, Joseph M. Hassett, Phillip L. Marcus, Ann Saddlemyer, Ronald Schuchard, Deirdre Toomey and Helen Vendler offer essays on such topics as Yeats and the Colours of Poetry, Yeats’s Shakespeare, Yeats and Seamus Heaney, Lacrimae Rerum and Tragic Joy, Raftery’s work on Yeats’s Thoor Ballylee, Edmund Dulac’s portrait of Mrs George Yeats, The Tower as an anti-Modernist monument, with close studies of ‘Vacillation’, ‘Her Triumph’, and ‘The Cold Heaven’. Throughout, the essays are inflected with memories of Jeffares and his critical methods. The volume is rounded with further essays on A Vision by Neil Mann and Matthew de Forrest, while reviews of recent editions and studies are provided by Matthew Campbell, Wayne K. Chapman, Sandra Clark, Denis Donoghue, Nicholas Grene, Joseph M. Hassett, and K.P.S. Jochum. Yeats Annual is published by Open Book Publishers in association with the Institute of English Studies, University of London.

"What critic of Spenser's poetry does not know, and acknowledge, a debt to Harry Berger? The collection, at last, of these seminal essays into a single volume is welcome news indeed for the generation of scholars who learned from them and can now more easily send their own students to them. . . . Their importance as documents of the discovery of Spenser, and the Spenserian mode, in the 1960s is given new prominence, moreover, by Berger's recent essays here on the 'metapastoralism' of The Shepheardes Calendar. In them, this New Critic comes home again to Spenser, recognizing the value of recent critical trends but arguing passionately for the centrality of the close reading of text. The result is a powerful case for reconciliation and consolidation of methods that have dominated literary study over the second half of this century."--Donald Cheney, co-editor of The Spenser Encyclopedia

This book offers a new way of understanding the old conflict between iconophiles and iconoclasts by exploring the way images in poetry are used by one poet, W. B. Yeats, and his translator, Yves Bonnefoy. Using the phenomenology of Jean-Luc Marion as a tool of interpretation, the book suggests further that translation is a significant act in which one entire theological world of a Protestant poet may become a completely different, Catholic one when the translation is performed by a culturally Catholic poet. For Bonnefoy, therefore, the act of translation becomes a profound act of hope.

Emphasizing the interplay of aesthetic forms and religious modes, Sean Pryor's ambitious study takes up the endlessly reiterated longing for paradise that features throughout the works of W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound. Yeats and Pound define poetry in terms of paradise and paradise in terms of poetry, Pryor suggests, and these complex interconnections fundamentally shape the development of their art. Even as he maps the shared influences and intellectual interests of Yeats and Pound, and highlights those moments when their poetic theories converge, Pryor's discussion of their poems' profound formal and conceptual differences uncovers the distinctive ways each writer imagines the divine, the good, the beautiful, or the satisfaction of desire. Throughout his study, Pryor argues that Yeats and Pound reconceive the quest for paradise as a quest for a new kind of poetry, a journey that Pryor traces by analysing unpublished manuscript drafts and newly published drafts that have received little attention. For Yeats and Pound, the journey towards a paradisal poetic becomes a never-ending quest, at once self-defeating and self-fulfilling - a formulation that has implications not only for the work of these two poets but for the study of modernist literature.

Setting the stage: apparitions of writing -- Shades of Will + words + worth: what's in a name? -- Hazlitt's conjurings: first acquaintance & "quaint allusion" -- Shelley's phantoms of the future in 1819 -- Me and my shadows: Byron's Company of ghosts -- Shades of relay: Yeats's latent Keats / Keats's latent Yeats -- After wording: writing of apparitions