William Butler Yeats : Selected Poems

by YEATS, WILLIAM BUTLER

• ISBN13: 9780517073964
• ISBN10: 051707396X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1992-03-01
• Publisher: Gramercy

Summary

William Butler Yeats was not only one of the most beloved and honored poets of this century. Playwright, essayist, theatrical impresario, occultist, politician, famously hapless lover--he was also one of the most colorful and complex. Astonishingly, no full biography of Yeats has appeared in many years. Now, Keith Alldritt gives us a lively telling of Yeats's story that puts the poet in the context of his times, from the high Victorian era to the modernism of the thirties. Alldritt reveals that Yeats was not just "the sensitive introvert who began as the mooning dreamer and after a lifetime seeking philosophical and hermetic wisdom, ended as the learned sage" that Yeats himself and his biographers would have us believe. He shows us a less familiar man: "a dedicated careerist, an ambitious man of determined self-interest, a seeker after social standing, and a combative man with a violent temper that sustained him in many nasty quarrels." Confrontational, scrappy, driven, he was deeply involved in both the political and literary issues of his day. He was instrumental in overturning the English domination of Irish literature and in researching and publishing books on Irish lore and fairy tales. He was the founder, with George Bernard Shaw, of the Irish Institute of Arts and Letters as well as the Abbey Theatre, where he refused to close down Synge's inflammatory play The Playboy of the Western World, despite riots in the street. During his tenure as senator in the Irish Parliament, he fought the Catholic divorce laws. At every level, Alldritt shows us a poet engaged in the world. Yeats's long, passionate, and physically unrequited love affair with the beautiful Irish nationalist Maud Gonne, which led to some of his most poignant poetry, is brought vividly to life. Also covered in some detail are Yeats's numerous love affairs in the years before his death. Though condoned by his wife, they have not been explored in previous biographies out of respect for her feelings. Another aspect of Yeats not generally appreciated is his involvement with literary movements outside Ireland and England. He wrote reviews for the Boston Globe; lectured regularly throughout the United States; and spent much time in France, where he was influenced by the symbolist poets, and in Italy, where he joined the Rapallo group led by the quixotic Ezra Pound. In his years of research, Alldritt visited libraries worldwide. He was given special access to Yeats's private papers in the National Library of Ireland and interviewed many people who knew or are knowledgeable about Yeats, most notably Yeats's daughter, Anne. Yeats has been called "the greatest poetic imagination of our century." Now Keith Alldritt reveals another facet of his extraordinary persona. William Butler Yeats was a master craftsman, and one of his most skillful constructs was his own image. He wished to be remembered, above all, as an Irishman and a poet; as a man whose nature had been determined by the almost magical qualities of his childhood in Sligo and whose character had been shaped by the influence of admirable men. There is truth in this depiction of himself, but it is a partial truth only. In this account, I attempt to go beyond his interior world and to evoke and do justice to those individuals and external forces which in their turn made up part of the dialectic of Yeats's life. Yeats lived at a time of profound changes for the Western world from the high Victorianism of the late 1800s to the advent of modernism in the 1930s. I have attempted to offer a strong sense of Yeats in his social and historical context--to show that an important side of his genius was his deep and often manipulative relationship with the turbulent life around him as with his turbulent life within.

Author Biography

Keith Alldritt, professor of English at the University of British Columbia, is the author of The Making of George Orwell, The Visual Imagination, D. H. Lawrence, Modernism in the Second World War, Churchill the Writer: His Life as a Man of Letters, The Greatest of Friends: Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, and three novels. Professor Alldritt is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and lives in Vancouver.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Early Poems I: Ballads And Lyrics

To Some I Have Talked with by the Fire

The Song of the Happy Shepherd

The Sad Shepherd

The Cloak, The Boat, and The Shoes

Anashuya and Vijaya

The Indian Upon God

The Indian to His Love

The Falling of the Leaves

Ephemera

The Madness of King Goll

The Stolen Child To An Isle in the Water

Down by the Salley Gardens

The Meditation of the Old Fisherman

The Ballad of Father O'Hart

The Ballad of Moll Magee

The Ballad of the Foxhunte?

Early Poems II: The Rose

To the Rose Upon the Rood of Time

Fergus and the Druid

The Death of Cuchulain The Rose of the World

The Rose of Peace

The Rose of Battle

A Faery Song

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

A Cradle Song

The Pity of Love

The Sorrow of Love

When You Are Old

The White Birds

A Dream of Death

A Dream of a Blessed Spirit

The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland

The Dedication to a Book of Stories Selected from the Irish Novelists

The Lamentation of the Old Pensioner

The Ballad of Father Gilligan

The Two Trees To Ireland in the Coming Times

The Wind Among the Reeds

The Hosting of the Sidhe

The Everlasting Voices

The Moods

The Lover Tells of the Rose in His Heart

The Host of the Air

The Fisherman

A Cradle Song

Into the Twilight

The Song of Wandering Aengus

The Song of the Old Mother

The Fiddler of Dooney

The Heart of the Woman

The Lover Mourns for the Loss of Love

He Mourns for the Change that Has Come Upon Him and His Beloved and Longs for the End of the World

He Bids His Beloved Be At Peace

He Reproves the Curlew

He Remembers Forgotten Beauty

A Poet to His Beloved

He Gives His Beloved Certain Rhymes

To My Heart Bidding It Have No Fear

The Cap and Bells

The Valley of the Black Pig

The Lover Asks Forgiveness

Because of His Many Moods

He Tells of a Valley Full of Lovers

He Tells of the Perfect Beauty

He Hears the Cry of the Sedge

He Thinks of Those Who Have Spoken Evil of His Beloved

The Blessed

The Secret Rose

The Lover Mourns Because of His Wanderings

The Travail of Passion

The Lover Pleads with His Friend for Old Friends

A Lover Speaks to Hearers of His Songs in Coming Days

The Poet Pleads with the Elemental Powers

He Wishes His Beloved were Dead

He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

He Thinks of His Past Greatness When a Part of the Constellations of Heaven

In the Seven Woods

In the Seven Woods

The Arrow

The Folly of Being Comforted

Old Memory

Never Give All the Heart

The Withering of the Boughs

Adam's Curse

Red Hanrahan's Song About Ireland

The Old Men Admiring Themselves in the Water

Upon the Moon

Chorus for a Play

The Players Ask for a Blessing of the Psalteries and Themselves

The Happy Townland

The Old Age of Queen Maeve

The Old Age of Queen Maeve

Baile and Aillinn

Baile and Aillinn

The Green Helmet and Other Poems

His Dream

A Woman Homer Sung

The Consolation

No Second Troy

Reconciliation

King and No King

Peace

Against Unworthy Praise

The Fascination of What's Difficult

A Drinking Song

The Coming of Wisdom with Time

On Hearing that the Students of Our University Have Joined the Ancient Order of Hibernians and the Agitation Against Immoral Literature

To a Poet, Who Would Have Me Praise Certain Bad Poets, Imitators of His and Mine

A Lyric from an Unpublished Play

Upon a House Shaken by the Land Agitation

At the Abbey Theatre

These Are the Clouds

At Galway Races

A Friend's Illness

All Things Can Tempt Me

The Young Man's Song

Responsibilities

Introductory Rhymes

The Grey Rock

The Two Kings

To a Wealthy Man Who Promised a Second Subscription to the Dublin Municipal Gallery if it Were Proved the People Wanted Pictures

Septe

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