The Identity of Yeats

by Richard Ellmann

This classic study of Yeats' verse examines the poet's development of theme, symbol, style, and pattern. Through his knowledge of Yeats' life as well as his published and unpublished work, Ellmann recreates Yeats' ways of thinking, seeing, and writing and clarifies his difficult poems.

Genres: Poetry, Literary Criticism, Biography

368 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1954

About the author

Richard David Ellmann was an American literary critic and biographer of the Irish writers James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, and William Butler Yeats. He won the U.S. National Book Award for Nonfiction for James Joyce (1959), one of the most acclaimed literary biographies of the 20th century. Its 1982 revised edition won James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Ellmann was a liberal humanist, and his academic work focuses on the major modernist writers of the 20th century.

Reviews

[Steven · Rating 5 out of 5]

So, starting off, obviously if you're not interested in the poetry of Yeats, stay the hell away from this book, obviously. What are you thinking? Not that that's clear:
This book is one of the earliest of Yeats biographies, written by a thoughtful, adept reader who was highly familiar with is work and somehow, perhaps a combination of charm, luck, and personality, gained unparalleled access to Yeats documentation, particularly via way of his wife, who was not someone to allow outsiders have casual connection. The result is, well, just what I wanted. My own experience is that biographies aren't quite written this way anymore. This book is more trying to delve into why Yeats was writing what he did, what he thought as he composed, what his direct influences were and what he himself said about them at the time. It's rich, and a pure delight to read.

Perhaps like you my initial introductions to reading Yeats were all so daunting... "He's got a richly developed personal symbology, to know Yeats you must know history, myth, religion, Irish culture and politics, and his own tangled biography of nationalism, Steinached monkey surgery," good lord, why begin? Well, the reason to begin is because Yeats is so compelling, and amazing, of course. And this book really takes all that dross and shows the reader that it's really much more simple than that. Not... simple as in shallow. But, simple as in, simply put Yeats was a thoughtful person with a richly developed send of his own purpose and goals as a poet and man. And it was such a joy to read through it.

Not only did the book make me understand better the Yeats poetry I knew, it introduced me to poems I'd never seen (some unpublished), gave comments and observations from Yeats himself from letters and conversations, and, well, I'm the better for it. I'm sure there are biographies out there that do some kind of more detailed historical account of the man, but would they do what this book did, make me love Yeats all the more and see more reasons to do so?

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I do not remember this one, and would have to read it again to review it in detail. However, I have read other of Ellmann's books, and know that I have enjoyed them.

Acquired 1997
Cheap Thrills, Montreal, Quebec

[Rich Martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good work explaining Yeats, whose "Second Coming" is, in my opinion, the best poem of the 20th century. Read it and consider the calamities of that century.