W.B. Yeats etal: [The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats: VOL IV]: Early Essays

✍ Scribed by Yeats, William Butler; Finneran, Richard J.; Bornstein, George

• Publisher: Scribner
• Year: 2007
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 1 MB
• Edition: Annotated
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN: 1416556877

✦ Synopsis

The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Volume IV: Early Essays is part of a fourteen-volume series under the general editorship of eminent Yeats scholars George Bornstein and George Mills Harper. These volumes include virtually all of the Nobel laureate's published work, in authoritative texts with extensive explanatory notes. Early Essays, edited by the internationally esteemed Yeats scholars George Bornstein and the late Richard J. Finneran, includes the contents of the two most important collections of Yeats's critical prose, Ideas of Good and Evil(1903) and The Cutting of an Agate(1912, 1919). Among the seminal essays are considerations of Blake, Shakespeare, Shelley, Spenser, and Synge, as well as an extended discussion of the Japanese Noh theatre. The first scholarly edition of these materials, Early Essays offers a corrected text and detailed annotation of all allusions. Several appendices gather materials from early printings which were later excluded, as well as illuminating black-and-white illustrations. Early Essays is an essential sourcebook for understanding Yeats's career as both writer and literary critic, and for the development of modern poetry and criticism. Here, Yeats works out many of his key ideas on poetry, politics, and the theater. He gives interpretations of writers critical to his development and presents a compelling vision of Ireland and the modern world during the last decade of the nineteenth century and first two decades of the twentieth. As T.S. Eliot remarked, Yeats "was one of those few whose history is the history of their own time, who are a part of the consciousness of an age which cannot be understood without them." This volume displays a crucial part of that history.;Early essays -- Ideas of good and evil -- What is 'popular poetry'? -- Speaking to the psaltery -- Magic -- The happiest of the poets -- The philosophy of Shelley's poetry -- At Stratford-on-Avon -- William Blake and the imagination -- William Blake and this illustrations to The Divine Comedy -- Symbolism in painting -- The symbolism of poetry -- The theatre -- The celtic element in literature -- The autumn of the body -- The moods -- The body of the Father Christina Rosencrux -- The Return of Ulysses -- Ireland and the arts -- The Galway Plains -- Emotion of multitude -- The curring of an agate -- Certain noble plays of Japan -- The tragic theatre -- Poetry and tradition -- Discoveries -- Prophet, priest and king -- Personality and the intellectual essences -- The musician nd the orator -- A guitar player -- The looking-glass -- The tree of life -- The praise of old wives' tales -- The play of modern manners -- Has the drama of contemporary life a root of its own? -- Why the blind man in ancient times was made a poet -- Concerning saints and artists -- The subject matter of drama -- The two kinds of asceticism -- In the serpent's mouth -- The black and the white arrows -- His mistress's eyebrows -- The tresses of the hair -- A tower on the Apennines -- The thinking of the body -- Religious belief necessary to religious art -- The holy places -- Preface to the first edition of The Well of the Saints -- Preface to the first edition of John M. Synge's Poems and Translations -- J.M. Synge and the Ireland of his time -- John Shawe-Taylor -- Art and ideas -- Edmund Spenser -- Yeats's prefaces and dedication -- Preface to The Cutting of an Agate (1912) -- Preface to The Cutting of an Agate (1919, 1924) -- Dedication of Essays (1924).