Prefaces and Introductions, Volume VI of The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, brings together for the first time thirty-two introductions by Yeats to the works of such literary greats as William Blake, J.M. Synge, Lady Gregory, Oscar Wilde, Oliver St. John Gogarty, Lionel Johnson, and Rabindranath Tagore. The introductions, which span the Nobel laureate’s entire career, reflect the broad reach of Yeats’s literary and cultural interests. Always insightful and often charming, Prefaces and Introductions reveals the breadth of Yeats’s talent as essayist, critic, folklorist, and raconteur.

Talking to the Gods explores the linkages between the imaginative literature and the occult beliefs and practices of four writers who were members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. William Butler Yeats, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, and Dion Fortune were all members of the occult organization for various periods from 1890 to 1930. Yeats, of course, is both a canonical and well-loved poet. Machen is revered as a master of the weird tale. Blackwood's work dealing with the supernatural was popular during the first half of the twentieth century and has been influential in the development of the fantasy genre. Fortune's books are acknowledged as harbingers of trends in second-wave feminist spirituality. Susan Johnston Graf examines practices, beliefs, and ideas engendered within the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and demonstrates how these are manifest in each author's work, including Yeats's major theoretical work, A Vision.

This book asserts that Oscar Wilde (1854 – 1900) was a major precursor of W.B. Yeats (1865 – 1939), and shows how Wilde’s image and intellect set in train a powerful influence within Yeats’s creative imagination that remained active throughout the poet’s life. The intellectual concepts, metaphysical speculations and artistic symbols and images which Yeats appropriated from Wilde changed the poet’s perspective and informed the imaginative system of beliefs that Yeats formulated as the basis of his dramatic and poetic work. Section One, 'Influence and Identity' (1888 – 1895), explores the personal relationship of these two writers, their nationality and historical context as factors in influence. Section Two, 'Mask and Image' (1888 – 1917), traces the creative process leading to Yeats’s construction of the antithetical mask, and his ideas on image, in relation to the role of Wilde as his precursor. Finally, 'Salomé: Symbolism, Dance and Theories of Being' (1891 – 1939) concentrates on the immense influence that Wilde’s symbolist play, Salomé, wrought on Yeats’s imaginative work and creative sensibility.

The two great Yeats Family Sales of 2017 and the legacy of the Yeats family’s 80-year tradition of generosity to Ireland’s great cultural institutions provide the kaleidoscope through which these advanced research essays find their theme. Hannah Sullivan’s brilliant history of Yeats’s versecraft challenges Poundian definitions of Modernism; Denis Donoghue offers unique family memories of 1916 whilst tracing the political significance of the Easter Rising; Anita Feldman addresses Yeats’s responses to the Rising’s appropriation of his symbols and myths, the daring artistry of his ritual drama developed from Noh, his poetry of personal utterance, and his vision of art as a body reborn rather than a treasure preserved amid the testing of the illusions that hold civilizations together in ensuing wars. Warwick Gould looks at Yeats as founding Senator in the new Free State, and his valiant struggle against the literary censorship law of 1929 (with its present-day legacy of Irish anti-blasphemy law still presenting a constitutional challenge). Drawing on Gregory Estate documents, James Pethica looks at the evictions which preceded Yeats’s purchase of Thoor Ballylee in Galway; Lauren Arrington looks back at Yeats, Ezra Pound, and the Ghosts of The Winding Stair (1929) in Rapallo. Having co-edited both versions of A Vision, Catherine Paul offers some profound reflections on ‘Yeats and Belief’. Grevel Lindop provides a pioneering view of Yeats’s impact on English mystical verse and on Charles Williams who, while at Oxford University Press, helped publish the Oxford Book of Modern Verse. Stanley van der Ziel looks at the presence of Shakespeare in Yeats’s Purgatory. William H. O’Donnell examines the vexed textual legacy of his late work, On the Boiler while Gould considers the challenge Yeats’s intentionalism posed for once-fashionable post-structuralist editorial theory. John Kelly recovers a startling autobiographical short story by Maud Gonne. While nine works of current biographical, textual and literary scholarship are reviewed, Maud Gonne is the focus of debate for two reviewers, as are Eva Gore-Booth, Constance and Casimir Markievicz, Rudyard Kipling, David Jones, T. S. Eliot and his presence on the radio.

This book comprehensively examines the relationship between literature and sculpture in the work of W. B. Yeats, drawing on extensive archival research to offer revelatory new readings of the poet. The book traces Yeats's literary and critical engagement with Celtic Revival statuary, publicmonuments in Dublin, the coin designs of the Irish Free State, abstract sculpture by the Vorticists and modernists, and a variety of carvings, decorative sculptures, and objets d'art. By charting Yeats's early art school education in Dublin, his attempts to raise funds for public monuments in thecity, and to secure commissions for his favourite sculptors, the book documents a lifelong interest in the plastic arts. New and original readings of Yeats's poetry, drama, and prose criticism emerge from this concertedly inter-arts and interdisciplinary study.

The essays in this collection examine Ireland at war and peace from the Revival period to the present day, examining key aspects of Irish literature and history—culturally rich but politically turbulent—from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century. Ireland at War and Peace examines important social, political and aesthetic contexts which have shaped modern Irish society and culture, from the First World War and the Easter Rising of 1916 through to the Troubles and beyond. A key focus is on the ideological and artistic significance of Irish culture in a wide sense; the volume includes essays on the cultural significance of commodity culture and advertising in Ireland, images of the child in Irish culture, the importance of the horse in the Irish imagination, and the manner in which narratives of eighteenth and nineteenth-century Irish uprising, execution and imprisonment informed Irish theatre both before and after the 1916 Uprising. The book’s dual focus is exemplified in its opening essays on Padraig Pearse as both rebel-rousing separatist polemicist and Volunteer leader, and on his related careers as dramatist, story writer and educationalist. Subsequent essays deal with Yeats and the Easter Rising, consumer culture in James Joyce’s Ulysses, the riotous reception afforded J. M. Synge’s Playboy of the Western World and Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars, and Samuel Beckett’s vexed relationship with his homeland. There are also important essays here on the contemporary Irish writers Seamus Heaney and Deirdre Madden. The focus of the collection is wide, ranging from canonical literary figures such as Joyce, Beckett, and Yeats, modern-day authors such as Heaney, Paul Muldoon and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, through to popular-cultural phenomena from Dion Boucicault’s nineteenth-century melodrama Robert Emmet, to Alan Parker’s movie of Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments and that great Irish sitcom Father Ted.

Yeats and Women is a special issue of the distinguished Yeats Annual series and is the first collection of essays upon W.B.Yeats to focus upon his relation to women. Its critical and biographical approaches employ feminist and psychoanalytic theory, and social anthropology. The seventeen plates (many hitherto unpublished) include the tomb and coffin of Maud Gonne's first child, Florence Farr's occult Egyptian shrine, and the last photograph of Yeats.

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.

Forty chapters, written by leading scholars across the world, describe the latest thinking on modern Irish poetry. The Handbook begins with a consideration of Yeats's early work, and the legacy of the 19th century. The broadly chronological areas which follow, covering the period from the 1910s through to the 21st century, allow scope for coverage of key poetic voices in Ireland in their historical and political context. From the experimentalism of Beckett, MacGreevy, and others of the modernist generation, to the refashioning of Yeats's Ireland on the part of poets such as MacNeice, Kavanagh, and Clarke mid-century, through to the controversially titled post-1969 'Northern Renaissance' of poetry, this volume will provide extensive coverage of the key movements of the modern period. The Handbook covers the work of, among others, Paul Durcan, Thomas Kinsella, Brendan Kennelly, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Michael Longley, Medbh McGuckian, and Ciaran Carson. The thematic sections interspersed throughout - chapters on women's poetry, religion, translation, painting, music, stylistics - allow for comparative studies of poets north and south across the century. Central to the guiding spirit of this project is the Handbook's consideration of poetic forms, and a number of essays explore the generic diversity of poetry in Ireland, its various manipulations, reinventions and sometimes repudiations of traditional forms. The last essays in the book examine the work of a 'new' generation of poets from Ireland, concentrating on work published in the last two decades by Justin Quinn, Leontia Flynn, Sinead Morrissey, David Wheatley, Vona Groarke, and others.