William Butler Yeats: Index of Commentaries

William Butler Yeats - Commentaries

General Index

Stephen Gwynn: ‘The greatest service that Yeats rendered to Ireland was his persistent refusal to accept as admirable anything that was commended solely by patriotic or virtuous intention.’ (Irish Literature and Drama, 1936; cited in Dominic Daly, The Young Douglas Hyde, 1974, p.121.)

T. S. Eliot: ‘He was one of those few whose history is the history of their own time, who are part of the consciousness of an age which cannot be understood without them.’ (Lecture on Yeats in the Abbey Theatre [1939], quoted in Terence Brown, The Life of W. B. Yeats, 2001, p.378; cited in Brendan T. Mitchell, PG Dip., UU 2009.)

William Empson: ‘He was a man of splendid energy, intelligence, and public spirit, fortunate in having a small country where affairs were almost of manageable size; it would have been beneath him not to take on the spirits too, and he was not defeated there, but one cannot feel they were among his major sucesses.’ (Quoted on Gregory Castle’s Facebook page, June 2014.)

Donald Davie: ‘The English poet-critic Donald Davie, when teaching at Trinity in the 1950s, said: ‘Nothing so surprised me from the first in literary Dublin as the extent to which Yeats is a prophet without honour in his own country ... Irish poets, Irish critics, and Irish readers have not yet recognised the logic of Yeats’s poetic development.’ (See Edna Longley, ‘Not Guilty?’, in Dublin Review, Autumn 2004 - online; accessed 24.06.2015).

Seamus Heaney: ‘Yeats was always passionately beating on the wall of the physical world in order to provoke an answer from the other side.’ (‘Joy or Night: Last Things in the Poetry of W. B. Yeats and Philip Larkin’, in Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001, London: Faber & Faber, p.319; quoted in Carl Campbell, PG Dip., UU 2009.)

Further remarks on Yeats and Joyce can be found under Joyce > Notes > “Literary Figures” - Yeats [as attached].

See also —

‘W. B. Yeats and James Joyce’s Comparable Use of Aesthetic Idioms’ - a RICORSO note [as attached].

Extra ..

Forrest Reid - W. B. Yeats: A Critical Study (London: Martin & Secker 1915) - as supra.
Ernest Boyd - Ireland’s Literary Revival (Dublin Maunsel 1916) - as supra.

File 2
George Orwell Seán O’Faoláin Denis Johnston Monk Gibbon	Balachandra Rajan William Empson Peter Ure Thomas Kinsella	Denis Donoghue Donald Davie Richard Kain Malcolm Brown	A. N. Jeffares Donald Torchiana Virginia Moore Richard Ellmann

See F. H. O’Donnell and his several diatribes against Yeats’s “Pseudo-Celticism” (q.v.).

File 5
R. F. Foster Malins & Purkis Joep Leerssen Gerry Smyth Terence Brown	Brenda Maddox Hermione Lee Rachel V. Billigheimer Selina Guinness Fintan O’Toole	Jonathan Allison Ann Saddlemyer Peter McDonald Tony Jordan Margaret Mills Harper	Aaron Kelly Mohammed Meimandi Alistair Cormack Matthew de Forrest Patrick Dowdall
Extra: Avies Platt, ‘A Lazarus Beside Me’, in London Review of Books (27 Aug. 2015), pp.29-32 [infra]

Note: A number of longer commentaries on Yeats by leading critics are held as note-taking extracts in the RICORSO Library, “Criticism > Major Authors” > W. B. Yeats - e.g.,

To be sure of locating all the files in this region of the website, go to RICORSO > Major Authors” > Index - since links to the longer extracts are updated more promptly at that location. The RICORSO password may be needed to access these - if so, please contact the Ricorso editor at the address given on the Front Page of the website..

Note: Neil Mann has posted all the contemporary reviews of A Vision (1925 & 1937) at Yeats’s Vision - online; accessed 01.05.2015.

Note: Extracts given here are listed by author and in order of date - i.e., chronologically according to the date of their first intervention. Subsequent interventions by the same are added on directly for the convenience of this compilation. Where longer extended extracts are given, these are presented in successive blocks of convenient length for the browser screen. In certain instances still longer extracts - i.e., reading notes or whole texts from which these extracts are taken - can be accessed in RICORSO Library under various sub-headings by means of the link provided under each in the relevant section of the listings here in Commentary. The links provided in each case will either bring up the whole-text in question in the current window or send you to the relevant index of the Library.

The compilation given here is largely based on the practice of copy-typing while reading the critical texts in question. Some have been captured electronically from internet or else by scanning, or otherwise copied from PDFs to Notepad and inserted as HTML on this website. Not a few have been supplied by students in the course of dissertation writing. As such, the sample given here reflects a curricular view of the secondary literature. It is hoped that it will alert readers to the merits of the critical texts in question, and hence inspire an examination of the books themselves. If and when the matter can be systematically addressed, authors’ permissions regarding the use of extended and/or full-text copys will be sought - along with a request further contributions and/or commissions contributing to the development of RICORSO.

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