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Yeats: 1865–1965

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Marion Witt
Marion Witt*
Affiliation:
Woodbridge, Conn.
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Extract

This yeats Centennial Year will witness the publication of widespread comment and encomium, “as though,” in Yeats's own words, “it were firmly established that the dead delight in anniversaries.” Now, as his first century joins its circle, Yeats is securely one of the “passionate dead,” who are, in his version of Ben Jonson's line, “So rammed with life they can but grow in life with being.” “Under Ben Bulben,” the elegiac poem which ends with Yeats's epitaph, written only a few months before he died in 1939, says of grave diggers

      They but thrust their buried men
      Back in the human mind again.

When the grave diggers had thrust Yeats back in the human mind, T. S. Eliot in a memorial lecture in 1940 called him “the greatest poet of our time—certainly the greatest in this language, and so far as I am able to judge, in any language.” Few have contradicted this evaluation. The mass of biography, criticism, exegesis in the years since Yeats died has grown so enormously that his poetry has at times seemed to face the fate he thought the human imagination had suffered in the nineteenth century, that of being “laid in a great tomb of criticism.” In his Centennial Year scholars might most profitably concern themselves not with the mounting tomb of criticism but rather with the texts of Yeats's works and the tools for study which the quarter century since his death has produced.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 80 , Issue 4-Part1 , September 1965, pp. 311 - 320
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1965

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References

1 T. S. Eliot, “The Poetry of W. B. Yeats,” The Southern Review, vii (1942), 442–454.

2 The Poems of W. B. Yeats (London: Macmillan, 1949), 2 vols.

3 Last Poems and Two Plays (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1939); Last Poems and Plays (London: Macmillan, 1940); Last Poems and Plays (New York: Macmillan, 1940).

4 Jon Stallworthy, Between the Lines: Yeats's Poetry in the Making (Oxford, 1963), p. 12.—Stallworthy quotes from an “unpublished letter” and dates it “as late as 1932.”

5 London and Stratford-upon-Avon: A. H. Bullen, 1912.

6 Printings in both The London Mercury and Last Poems (Dublin) use may be instead of maybe in this line.

7 Cf. G. D. P. Allt, “Yeats and the Revision of His Early Verse,” Hermathena, No. lxiv (November 1944), pp. 40–58; and M. Witt, “A Competition for Eternity: Yeats's Revisions of His Later Poems,” PMLA, lxiv (March 1949), 90–101.

8 London, 1949.

9 Letters from AE, selected and edited by Alan Denson (London, New York, Toronto, 1961), p. 46.

10 Published under the title Per Amica Silentia Lunae, 1918.

11 “Under Ben Bulben,” TLS, 21 January 1965.

12 T. Sturge Moore, “Yeats,” English: The Magazine of the English Association, ii (1939), 273–278.

13 First titled “William Blake,” The Academy, 19 June 1897. Reprinted in Ideas of Good and Evil (1903) and in Essays (1924).

14 “William Blake and His Illustrations to The Divine Comedy,” The Savoy, July-September 1896. Reprinted in Ideas of Good and Evil (1903) and in Essays (1924).

15 “The Celt in London,” The Boston Pilot, 28 December 1889. Reprinted under the title “Chevalier Burke and Shule Aroon,” in Letters to the New Island (Cambridge, Mass., 1934).

16 T. Sturge Moore noted both the false citation and the misquoted lines as evidence of Yeats's “disabling inaccuracy.”—“Yeats,” English, ii (1939), 273–278.

17 The Letters of Edward Dowden and His Correspondents (London and New York, 1914), p. 130.

18 L. A. G. Strong, The Sacred River (London, 1949), p. 219.

19 Louis MacNeice, The Poetry of W. B. Yeats (London and New York, 1941), p. 197.

20 “The Arts and Crafts: An Exhibition at William Morris's,” The Providence Sunday Journal, 26 October 1890.—Horace Reynolds missed this sketch when he gathered Yeats's contributions to New England papers for Letters to the New Island.

21 Review of Maeterlinck's Aglavaine and Sélysette, The Bookman, September 1897.

22 The Bookman, November 1896.

23 Preface to Axel by Jean Marie Matthias Philippe Auguste, Count de Villiers de l'Isle Adam, translated by H. P. R. Finberg (London, 1925).

24 “That Subtle Shade,” a review of Arthur Symons' London Nights, The Bookman, August 1895.

25 The Bookman, July and September 1897.

26 “The Stone and the Elixir,” a review of Ibsen's Brand, The Bookman, October 1894.

27 “The Poetry of Sir Samuel Ferguson,” The Dublin University Review, November 1886.

28 “Battles Long Ago,” a review of Standish O'Grady's The Coming of Cuchullin, The Bookman, February 1895.

29 The Bookman, December 1892.

30 “The Irish Literary Theatre,” Literature, 6 May 1899.

31 11 November 1911.

32 The United Irishman, 24 October 1903.

33 The Irish Statesman, 22 September 1928.

34 The Irish Statesman, 2 August 1924.

35 “Ireland Bewitched,” The Contemporary Review, September 1899.

36 “The Cradles of Gold,” The Senate, November 1896.

37 “Away,” The Fortnightly Review, April 1902.

38 “The Broken Gates of Death,” The Fortnightly Review, April 1898.

39 “Ireland Bewitched.”

40 “Away.”

41 “John Eglinton,” United Irishman, 9 November 1901.

42 The Metropolitan Magazine, April 1905.

43 The Observer, 17 February 1918. Reprinted in The Little Review, November 1918.

44 The Spectator, 2 June 1933.

45 The Listener, 4 August 1938.

46 The Bounty of Sweden (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1925).