The Collected Works, Vol. 4: Early Essays

The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats #4

by W.B. Yeats, Richard J. Finneran, George Bornstein

"The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume IV: Early Essays" is part of a fourteen-volume series under the general editorship of eminent Yeats scholars George Bornstein and George Mills Harper. These volumes include virtually all of the Nobel laureate's published work, in authoritative texts with extensive explanatory notes.

"Early Essays, " edited by the internationally esteemed Yeats scholars George Bornstein and the late Richard J. Finneran, includes the contents of the two most important collections of Yeats's critical prose, "Ideas of Good and Evil"(1903) and "The Cutting of an Agate"(1912, 1919). Among the seminal essays are considerations of Blake, Shakespeare, Shelley, Spenser, and Synge, as well as an extended discussion of the Japanese Noh theatre. The first scholarly edition of these materials, "Early Essays" offers a corrected text and detailed annotation of all allusions. Several appendices gather materials from early printings which were later excluded, as well as illuminating black-and-white illustrations.

"Early Essays" is an essential sourcebook for understanding Yeats's career as both writer and literary critic, and for the development of modern poetry and criticism. Here, Yeats works out many of his key ideas on poetry, politics, and the theater. He gives interpretations of writers critical to his development and presents a compelling vision of Ireland and the modern world during the last decade of the nineteenth century and first two decades of the twentieth. As T. S. Eliot remarked, Yeats "was one of those few whose history is the history of their own time, who are a part of the consciousness of an age which cannot be understood without them." This volume displays a crucial part of that history.

Genres: Literary Criticism, Essays, Irish Literature

560 pages, Hardcover

First published March 6, 2007

About the author

William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and dramatist, and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years Yeats served as an Irish Senator for two terms. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival, and along with Lady Gregory and Edward Martyn founded the Abbey Theatre, serving as its chief during its early years. In 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for what the Nobel Committee described as "inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation." He was the first Irishman so honored. Yeats is generally considered one of the few writers who completed their greatest works after being awarded the Nobel Prize; such works include The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1929).

Yeats was born and educated in Dublin but spent his childhood in County Sligo. He studied poetry in his youth, and from an early age was fascinated by both Irish legends and the occult. Those topics feature in the first phase of his work, which lasted roughly until the turn of the century. His earliest volume of verse was published in 1889, and those slow paced and lyrical poems display debts to Edmund Spenser and Percy Bysshe Shelley, as well as to the Pre-Raphaelite poets. From 1900, Yeats' poetry grew more physical and realistic. He largely renounced the transcendental beliefs of his youth, though he remained preoccupied with physical and spiritual masks, as well as with cyclical theories of life.
--from Wikipedia

Reviews

[Jacob Hurley · Rating 3 out of 5]

These are mostly from Yeats' first two books of essays, Ideas of Good and Evil from the pre-raphaelite era (1902) and Cutting of an Agate from the weaker Responsibilities era (1912) of Yeats' career. They come at either end of his lengthy break from poetry in the decade between, where he focused primarily on promotion of the Irish theatre and on coping with Maud Gonne's repeated refusal to marry him. As such, a great number of these essays are about either the theatre, with his theories about the ecstatic characters of Shakespeare's and John Synge's unique drams, or about the necessity of a mythopaeic-literary revival among the Irish people. All his essays have a mostly discursive and relaxed style, usually beginning with anecdotal reminiscences and then following the convoluted romantic logic that Yeats sincerely believed ... rather than embarking in very stern rhetoric or argumentation, he seems to prefer painting a vivid, slightly deranged portrait of the artistic or cultural feeling that he wishes to share. As such, we see things like full embracings of Irish magic (although he refrains from sharing much about the Golden Dawn or theosophists), twenty page monologues about Shakespeare and Spenser that border on reverie, and tracts on various Irish figures that bounce back and forth between dreamy praise and anecdote. It's perhaps disappointing but definitely unsurprising that Yeats didn't produce articulate defenses of his intellectual projects, as it's the nature of his writings and the Irish scene he cultivated to express through the old, opaque Irish dictum and attitude.

His writings on poets and other authors is pretty similar. He espouses some interesting theories, namely his concept of symbolism as a metaphor as literally true in the world as in poetry, bordering on magic; he considers also the nature of spoken poetry, ultimately arriving at an anti-singerly style of declaimation that most great poets before and after have arrived at (as Yeats said when accosted about his inhumane cantation after a reading, Every poet since Homer has spoken this way). His organon of literary taste mostly centers around the odious couple, Blake and Shelley, always referring back to them, speaking of them mostly in excited recapitulations of his favorites among their images and metaphors ... more interesting is his repudiation of Robert Burns, whose style he argues relies on artificial resurrections of folklore, dubious relegation to sung melodies, and a faux-nationalism in his use of the Scots dictum.

Despite my feelings that these essays are pretty vacuous, he is still a pretty good writer of prose, picking the right words and sentences, moving things along at a fair pace. As Yeats was a mystery to his self for much of his life and especially during these earlier years, these aren't really a good substitute for a good biography or study on Yeats, but perhaps are worth reading for obsessives trying to get a better picture of his theatrical projects of the 00s.

[Mary]

amazing ... insightful