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, public monuments 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 the city, 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 forty-two chapters in this book consider Yeats's early toil, his practical and esoteric concerns as his career developed, his friends and enemies, and how he was and is understood. This Handbook brings together critics and writers who have considered what Yeats wrote and how he wrote, moving between texts and their contexts in ways that will lead the reader through Yeats's multiple selves as poet, playwright, public figure, and mystic. It assembles a variety of views and adds to a sense of dialogue, the antinomian or deliberately-divided way of thinking that Yeats relished and encouraged. This volume puts that sense of a living dialogue in tune both with the history of criticism on Yeats and also with contemporary critical and ethical debates, not shirking the complexities of Yeats's more uncomfortable political positions or personal life. It provides one basis from which future Yeats scholarship can continue to participate in the fascination of all the contributors here in the satisfying difficulty of this great writer.

This volume traces Yeats fascination with the visual arts and their influence on his poetry. Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux demonstrates how the influences in Yeats' early years, especially his interest in Pre-Raphaelite painting, helped shape his aesthetic theory and practice as a poet. She argues that the analogies Yeats often used between the visual arts and literature provide an apt way to characterize his own work. In the early verse, the governing analogy is poem-as-painting; later, influenced by his work inthe theatre, Yeats writes poems analogous to the three-dimensional forms of sculpture. Loizeaux's thorough documentation and scholarly approach make her book a useful contribution to our understanding of Yeats' poetry.

Modernism, as a powerful movement, saw the literary and artistic traditions, as well as pure science, starting to evolve radically, creating a crisis, even chaos, in culture and society. Within this chaos, myth offered an ordered picture of that world employing symbolic and poetic images. Both W.B. Yeats and Angelos Sikelianos embraced myth and symbols because they liberate imagination and raise human consciousness, bringing together humans and the cosmos. Being opposed to the rigidity of scientific materialism that inhibits spiritual development, the two poets were waiting for a new age and a new religion, expecting that they, themselves, would inspire their community and usher in the change. In their longing for a new age, archaeology was a magnetic field for Yeats and Sikelianos, as it was for many writers and thinkers. After Sir Arthur Evans’s discovery of the Minoan Civilization where women appeared so peacefully prominent, the dream of re-creating a gynocentric mythology was no longer a fantasy. In Yeats’s and Sikelianos’s gynocentric mythology, the feminine figure appears in various forms and, like in a drama, it plays different roles. Significantly, a gynocentric mythology permeates the work of the two poets and this mythology is of pivotal importance in their poetry, their poetics and even in their life as the intensity of their creative desire brought to them female personalities to inspire and guide them. Indeed, in Yeats’s and Sikelianos’s gynocentric mythology, the image of the feminine holds a place within a historical context taking the reader into a larger social, political and religious space.

In contrast to the many critics who consider W. B. Yeats a dominant influence on Beckett's drama, this study demonstrates that the two are almost diametrically opposed in their theater and that the real bridge to Beckett's art is to be found in the narrative and pictorial creations of the younger Yeats brother, Jack.

This study explores James Joyce's struggle to come to terms with the aesthetic outlooks current at the beginning of the century by examining his portrayal of their dangers and attractions in his two most fully realized characters, Stephen Dedalus in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Leopold Bloom in Ulysses.

"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