The Collected Works, Vol. 5: Later Essays

The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats #5

by W.B. Yeats

Compiling nineteen essays and introductions, a volume with explanatory notes includes Per Amica Silentia Lunae and On the Boiler as well as introductions on Shelley and Balzac and essays on Irish poetry and politics.

Genres: Essays, Literary Criticism, Irish Literature

512 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1994

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 4 out of 5]

A lot of this volume is ridiculous, like so much of Yeats' writing, but not all of it. Probably one third of it, or more, is dedicated to introductions Yeats wrote for his favorite new books of the day -- naturally, for an old Yeats set in his favorites (Blake, Shelley, AE, and now Swedenborg and Balzac apparently), these are all New Age books about Indian religion and esoteric intercourse with the dead. For the hundred-plus pages, he says surprisingly little about these religions, rather preferring to recount the always-stoic dispositions of their authors at dinners and to compare the religious ecstasies with those he had reading Prometheus Unbound as a youth. His essays about magic are even less substantial, mostly involving long strings of unellaborated-upon anecdotes about village people he met who believed in ghosts and disingenuous citations of more rigorous authors admitting the faint possibility of the supernatural.

Fortunately this volume also has some of Yeats' best essays. His "If I were Four-And-Twenty" is a similarly rambling but all-the-same honest reflection on life as a whole, probably as good a portrait as any of the mortal Yeats, who wishes he would have converted to Catholicism and read all Balzac's books as a young man. Also included are two lengthy and in depth essays on poetry from Tennyson to Eliot -- lengthy whirlwinds of favorite passages and characteristically incisive evaluations of the poet as a human being, whether the ethereally mythic Dorothy Wellesley, machine bureacrat Pound, the drunken goons of Irish 1890s poetry or the calm figure of Hopkins that bored Yeats in meeting him at age 17. Half from a radio broadcast, one wishes that a BBC pencil-pusher hadn't decided to burn almost every single recording of Yeats' in order to 'free up some space'. Also present are the august reflections of the 1937 preface to essays and the epic (possibly crypto-fascist) On The Boiler ... in the former, a reflection on Yeats' entire career, mostly autobiography but ending in the electric profession that his entire career and life has been motivated by the hatred of everything so deeply concentrated in his irish blood; in the latter, a reflection on the total ineptitude of bureaucrat education in Eire and some mild suggestions about how it all may be improved. Probably you could buy the entire volume to read those two essays, however implausibly moments of clarity at the ass-end of seventy years of peaceful psychosis.

Also present is 'Per Amica Silentia Lunae', as I understand it a sort of prologue to The Vision; I am saving this to read later, so I cannot comment on it, other than that it probably adds a lot of value to this volume ... although perhaps not enough, given that it seems very few people have ever bothered to read this.