The Collected Works Of W B Yeats Vol Vi Prefaces And Introductions

Prefaces and Introductions, Volume VI of The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, brings together for the first time thirty-two introductions by Yeats to the works of such literary greats as William Blake, J.M. Synge, Lady Gregory, Oscar Wilde, Oliver St. John Gogarty, Lionel Johnson, and Rabindranath Tagore. The introductions, which span the Nobel laureate’s entire career, reflect the broad reach of Yeats’s literary and cultural interests. Always insightful and often charming, Prefaces and Introductions reveals the breadth of Yeats’s talent as essayist, critic, folklorist, and raconteur.

Prefaces and Introductions, Volume VI of The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, brings together for the first time thirty-two introductions by Yeats to the works of such literary greats as William Blake, J.M. Synge, Lady Gregory, Oscar Wilde, Oliver St. John Gogarty, Lionel Johnson, and Rabindranath Tagore. The introductions, which span the Nobel laureate’s entire career, reflect the broad reach of Yeats’s literary and cultural interests. Always insightful and often charming, Prefaces and Introductions reveals the breadth of Yeats’s talent as essayist, critic, folklorist, and raconteur.

This volume in The Collected Edition of the Works of W.B.Yeats brings together for the first time thirty-two introductions written for anthologies that he edited or for books by other writers. The introductions span the full length of his career. Their topics range from Irish legends and folklore to the design of graceful new Irish coins. The authors he discusses include William Blake, J.M.Synge, Lady Gregory, Oscar Wilde, Oliver St John Gogarty, Lionel Johnson and Rabindranath Tagore. Full explanatory notes and an index give the reader easy access to the volume's diverse array of topics. The text is reliable and accurate.

Prefaces and Introductions, Volume VI of The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, brings together for the first time thirty-two introductions by Yeats to the works of such literary greats as William Blake, J.M. Synge, Lady Gregory, Oscar Wilde, Oliver St. John Gogarty, Lionel Johnson, and Rabindranath Tagore. The introductions, which span the Nobel laureate's entire career, reflect the broad reach of Yeats's literary and cultural interests. Writing of fairies, ghosts, and witches in his introduction to Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, Yeats discovers that they were still extant in Ireland, at least in 1888, "giving gifts to the kindly, and plaguing the surly." In his preface to Stories from Carleton he tells of that sweetest ginger of Gaelic tunes, Mary Carleton, who was once asked to sing the air "The Red-haired Man's Wife" and replied: "I will sing for you, but the English words and the air are like a quarreling man and wife. The Irish melts into the tune: the English does not." And in distinguishing the Irish from the English poets of his day in A Treasury of Irish Poetry in the English Tongue, Yeats remarks: "Contemporary Irish poets believe in spiritual life, invisible and troubling, and express their belief in their poetry. Contemporary English poets are interested in the glory, the order, the passion or the pleasure of the world." Always insightful and often charming, Prefaces and Introductions reveals the breadth of Yeats's talent as essayist, critic, folklorist, and raconteur.

This volume in The Collected Edition of the Works of W.B.Yeats brings together for the first time thirty-two introductions written for anthologies that he edited or for books by other writers. The introductions span the full length of his career. Their topics range from Irish legends and folklore to the design of graceful new Irish coins. The authors he discusses include William Blake, J.M.Synge, Lady Gregory, Oscar Wilde, Oliver St John Gogarty, Lionel Johnson and Rabindranath Tagore. Full explanatory notes and an index give the reader easy access to the volume's diverse array of topics. The text is reliable and accurate.

This book asserts that Oscar Wilde (1854 – 1900) was a major precursor of W.B. Yeats (1865 – 1939), and shows how Wilde’s image and intellect set in train a powerful influence within Yeats’s creative imagination that remained active throughout the poet’s life. The intellectual concepts, metaphysical speculations and artistic symbols and images which Yeats appropriated from Wilde changed the poet’s perspective and informed the imaginative system of beliefs that Yeats formulated as the basis of his dramatic and poetic work. Section One, 'Influence and Identity' (1888 – 1895), explores the personal relationship of these two writers, their nationality and historical context as factors in influence. Section Two, 'Mask and Image' (1888 – 1917), traces the creative process leading to Yeats’s construction of the antithetical mask, and his ideas on image, in relation to the role of Wilde as his precursor. Finally, 'Salomé: Symbolism, Dance and Theories of Being' (1891 – 1939) concentrates on the immense influence that Wilde’s symbolist play, Salomé, wrought on Yeats’s imaginative work and creative sensibility.

Talking to the Gods explores the linkages between the imaginative literature and the occult beliefs and practices of four writers who were members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. William Butler Yeats, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, and Dion Fortune were all members of the occult organization for various periods from 1890 to 1930. Yeats, of course, is both a canonical and well-loved poet. Machen is revered as a master of the weird tale. Blackwood's work dealing with the supernatural was popular during the first half of the twentieth century and has been influential in the development of the fantasy genre. Fortune's books are acknowledged as harbingers of trends in second-wave feminist spirituality. Susan Johnston Graf examines practices, beliefs, and ideas engendered within the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and demonstrates how these are manifest in each author's work, including Yeats's major theoretical work, A Vision.

The essays in this collection examine Ireland at war and peace from the Revival period to the present day, examining key aspects of Irish literature and history—culturally rich but politically turbulent—from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century. Ireland at War and Peace examines important social, political and aesthetic contexts which have shaped modern Irish society and culture, from the First World War and the Easter Rising of 1916 through to the Troubles and beyond. A key focus is on the ideological and artistic significance of Irish culture in a wide sense; the volume includes essays on the cultural significance of commodity culture and advertising in Ireland, images of the child in Irish culture, the importance of the horse in the Irish imagination, and the manner in which narratives of eighteenth and nineteenth-century Irish uprising, execution and imprisonment informed Irish theatre both before and after the 1916 Uprising. The book’s dual focus is exemplified in its opening essays on Padraig Pearse as both rebel-rousing separatist polemicist and Volunteer leader, and on his related careers as dramatist, story writer and educationalist. Subsequent essays deal with Yeats and the Easter Rising, consumer culture in James Joyce’s Ulysses, the riotous reception afforded J. M. Synge’s Playboy of the Western World and Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars, and Samuel Beckett’s vexed relationship with his homeland. There are also important essays here on the contemporary Irish writers Seamus Heaney and Deirdre Madden. The focus of the collection is wide, ranging from canonical literary figures such as Joyce, Beckett, and Yeats, modern-day authors such as Heaney, Paul Muldoon and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, through to popular-cultural phenomena from Dion Boucicault’s nineteenth-century melodrama Robert Emmet, to Alan Parker’s movie of Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments and that great Irish sitcom Father Ted.