"This book treats the poetics of biblical allusion in the lyric poetry of William Butler Yeats, and the ways in which the King James Bible became for Yeats a model for poetry as a communal voice shaping a culture." "The introduction analyzes the critical history of what Eleanor Cook has termed the "poetics of allusion," emphasizing the work of the Italian rhetorician Gian Biago Conte and the American critic and poet John Hollander. The major topics considered here are allusions as the intersections of texts, as figures of speech, and as structural signifiers; the centrality of the reader in the study of allusion; the quality of allusions, their placement and varying degrees of clarity; and the centrality of the study of allusion to cultural criticism." "The first chapter is concerned with the development of the Bible as a model for secular poetry from the late eighteenth century to Yeats, surveying Bishop Lowth, Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Matthew Arnold, as well as Yeats's references in his prose works to the Bible as a model for art and the artist, and his desire to restore the Bible as sacred text, yet write his own Bible." "Chapters 2 through 5 take up in detail the poetics of biblical allusion and echo in the poems. Chapter 2 treats the poetry of the nineties: here Yeats usually engages the Bible as an antagonist, subverting it for the sake of a Celtic consciousness, denying its exclusive claim to spiritual truth. But many biblical echoes show Yeats's dependence upon the Bible as a guide to poetic language. Chapter 3 concerns the poetry from In the Seven Worlds to The Wild Swans at Coole. Yeats looks on Scripture with an ironic eye, often replacing it with what he calls "haughtier texts," the parables, prayers, visions, and private revelations that mirror biblical models and make biblical texts into warrants for his own theory of rebirth. Chapter 4 is a close reading of biblical intertextuality in seven poems: "The Second Coming," "Sailing to Byzantium," "Meditations in Time of Civil War," "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen," "Prayer for My Son," "Dialogue of Self and Soul," and "Vacillation." In these major poems Yeats displays his antitheticality, as Hazard Adams calls it, putting into dramatic tension biblical texts and his own heterodox ideas about birth, death, and resurrection. Chapter 5 examines the poetry after "Vacillation," where Yeats gives biblical texts (often text used before) a new sensual gloss, but also admits the limits of a "high talk" derived from scriptural language." "Chapter 6 places Yeats in the broad context of biblical intertextuality, working backward from modernism to Romanticism. First, the study contrasts Yeats with two of his contemporaries, D. H. Lawrence and T. S. Eliot, for whom the Bible always asserts its religious authority, in the Victorian tradition of Arnold, Clough, Browning, and Tennyson. The study concludes by comparing Yeats to Wordsworth and Shelley. Although Yeats is deeply indebted to them, his attitude is distinct from theirs: even when rejecting the Bible, Wordsworth. and Shelley accept a dogmatic view of it, while Yeats escapes dogmatism."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Emphasizing the interplay of aesthetic forms and religious modes, Sean Pryor's ambitious study takes up the endlessly reiterated longing for paradise that features throughout the works of W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound. Yeats and Pound define poetry in terms of paradise and paradise in terms of poetry, Pryor suggests, and these complex interconnections fundamentally shape the development of their art. Even as he maps the shared influences and intellectual interests of Yeats and Pound, and highlights those moments when their poetic theories converge, Pryor's discussion of their poems' profound formal and conceptual differences uncovers the distinctive ways each writer imagines the divine, the good, the beautiful, or the satisfaction of desire. Throughout his study, Pryor argues that Yeats and Pound reconceive the quest for paradise as a quest for a new kind of poetry, a journey that Pryor traces by analysing unpublished manuscript drafts and newly published drafts that have received little attention. For Yeats and Pound, the journey towards a paradisal poetic becomes a never-ending quest, at once self-defeating and self-fulfilling - a formulation that has implications not only for the work of these two poets but for the study of modernist literature.

Unlocking the Poetry of W.B. Yeats undertakes a thorough re-reading of Yeats' oeuvre as an extended meditation on the image and theme of the heart as it is evident within the poetry. It places the heart at the centre of a complex web of Yeatsian preoccupations and associations—from the biographical, to the poetic and philosophical, to the mythological and mystical. In particular, the book seeks to unlock Yeats’ mystifying aesthetic vision via his understanding of the ancient Egyptian "Weighing of the Heart" ceremony. The work provides a chronological narrative arc that looks to use the theme of the heart as it recurs in the poetry in order to circumvent and overcome more established frameworks. Its purpose is to offer refreshing ways of conceptualizing and building alternatives to more deeply entrenched, but not entirely satisfactory arguments that have been offered since Yeats' death in 1939, while demonstrating the centrality of the occult to Yeats' art.

In this multi-volume edition, the poetry of W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) is presented in full, with newly-established texts and detailed, wide-ranging commentary. Yeats began to write verse in the nineteenth century, and over time his own arrangements of poems repeatedly revised and rearranged both texts and canon. This edition of Yeats’s poetry presents all his verse, both published and unpublished, including a generous selection of textual variants from the many manuscript and printed sources. The edition also supplies the most extensive commentary on Yeats’s poetry to date, explaining specific references, and setting poems in their contexts; it also gives an account of the vast range of both literary and historical influences at work on the verse. The poems are presented in order of composition, and major revisions or rewritings of poems result in separate inclusions (in chronological sequence) for these writings as they were subsequently reconceived by the poet. In this second volume, the poems of Yeats’s early maturity emerge in the contexts of his engagement with Irish history and myth, along with nationalist politics; his increasing involvement with ritual magic and esoteric lore; and his turbulent, often unhappy, personal life. The poems of The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics (1892) reveal a poet of intense narrative power and metaphorical resource, adept at transforming miscellaneous sources into haunting and original poems. A major revision of his earlier narrative, ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’, takes place in this decade when Yeats is also taken up with the composition of elaborate and uncanny symbolic lyrics, many of them resulting from his love for Maud Gonne, that are finally collected in The Wind Among the Reeds (1899). This edition makes it possible to trace in detail Yeats’s debts to folklore and magic, alongside his involved and often difficult private and public life, in poetry of exceptional complexity and power.

How does one culture 'read' another? In Literature and Religion, two scholars, one from China and one from the West, each read texts from the other's culture as a means of dialogue. A key issue in such an enterprise is the nature of religion and what we understand by that term in a world in which ancient religious customs seem to be dying or under threat. Does a comparative study of religious literature offer a way towards mutual understanding - or merely illustrate our differences? Underpinned by their own friendship, these two partners in conversation show what is possible.

Emphasizing the interplay of aesthetic forms and religious modes, Sean Pryor's ambitious study takes up the endlessly reiterated longing for paradise that features throughout the works of W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound. Yeats and Pound define poetry in terms of paradise and paradise in terms of poetry, Pryor suggests, and these complex interconnections fundamentally shape the development of their art. Even as he maps the shared influences and intellectual interests of Yeats and Pound, and highlights those moments when their poetic theories converge, Pryor's discussion of their poems' profound formal and conceptual differences uncovers the distinctive ways each writer imagines the divine, the good, the beautiful, or the satisfaction of desire. Throughout his study, Pryor argues that Yeats and Pound reconceive the quest for paradise as a quest for a new kind of poetry, a journey that Pryor traces by analysing unpublished manuscript drafts and newly published drafts that have received little attention. For Yeats and Pound, the journey towards a paradisal poetic becomes a never-ending quest, at once self-defeating and self-fulfilling - a formulation that has implications not only for the work of these two poets but for the study of modernist literature.

Leading scholars chart the complex, multifaceted cultural impact of the King James Bible over its 400 years.

A defining volume of essays in which leading international scholars apply an interdisciplinary approach to the long and evolving relationship between English Literature and Theology.

This book focuses on W. B. Yeats’s critical writings, an aspect of his oeuvre which has been given limited treatment so far. It traces his critical work from his earliest articles, through to his occult treatises, and all the way to his last pamphlets, in which he sought to delineate the idea of a literary culture: a community of people willing to credit poetry with the central role in imagining and organising social praxis throughout society. The chapters of this study investigate the contexts in which Yeats’s thought developed, his many disputes over the shape of Irish cultural politics, the future of poetry and the place literature occupies in the world. What transpires is an image of Yeats who is strung between the impulses of faith in the existence of a supernatural order and ironic scepticism as to the possibility of ever capturing that order in language. This study is distinguished by its grounding of Yeats's critical agenda in a broader context through textual analysis. In addition, it organises and systematises his conceptions of poetry and its social role through its approach to his criticism as a fully-fledged area of his artistic practice. The monograph has been written within the framework of the project financed by The National Science Centre, Cracow, Poland, pursuant to the decision number DEC-2013/09/D/HS2/02782.

Includes a special section on teaching Yeats