Eminent Domain: Yeats Among Wilde, Joyce, Pound, Eliot & Auden

by Richard Ellmann

Interweaving history, criticism, and biography, this book is the first to present the relations among six great founders of modern literature.

Genres: Poetry

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1970

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

[Kevin Fitzpatrick · Rating 4 out of 5]

"'Influence' is a term which conceals and mitigates the guilty acquisitiveness of talent. That writers flow into each other like waves, gently rather than tidally, is one of those decorous myths we impose upon a high-handed, even brutal procedure. The behavior, while not invariably marked by bad temper, is less polite. Writers move upon other writers not as genial successors but as violent expropriators, knocking down established boundaries to seize by the force of youth, or of age, what they require. They do not borrow, they override." (Ellmann, 3)

Thus Richard Ellmann announces, in this well-conceived Introduction, the theme, and scope, of his study of the influence of Irish poet (and Nobel laureate) William Butler Yeats on five other 19th and 20th century modernist writers, namely Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and W.H. Auden. Part biography, part critical overview, all entertaining and informative to the core, "Eminent Domain" covers, in its six chapters, the intersection, over the course of decades, of W.B. Yeats with the 'eminent' writers of his time. Starting with Oscar Wilde, that noted bon vivant of the 1890s, whose influence on the young Yeats was notable for its coruscating sense of allegiance and loyalties of the two Protestant Irish men to the written word, and leading to that of James Joyce, whose impetuosity and imperiousness upon meeting the much older Yeats and declaring that Yeats was 'too old' to be influenced (taught) by the arrogant Joyce, and ending with the brief yet anxious influence on the work of W.H. Auden, the book, like good benignant gossip among friends, combines acute line by line analysis of relevant poetry with 'inside scoops' as to who said what, that is sure to entertain the many afficionados out there for Modernist writers. Indeed, the 'blessings' of viewing this work not only include this selfsame sense of the 'scoop,' but also a deep dive into the prose stylings of Mr. Ellmann, no mean practitioner of the literary arts, which goes a long way to making this work, a 'bite-sized' 126 pages, one of the most enjoyable reads I have had in a long time. While reads of Mr. Ellmann's magisterial biographies of James Joyce and Oscar Wilde will be informed in a much more comprehensive manner than those who read "Eminent Domain," the effort makes up in intensity what it lacks in 'heft,' so readers will still gain perspicacious insight into critical terrain, mined later by Harold Bloom in his effort "The Anxiety of Influence," that is as eloquently stated as it is damn true. For that reason, and a million others that do not need to be mentioned, I can recommend this slight yet essential tome a great deal!