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On the present site, photos of some Yeatsian locations: Coole Park, the home of Lady Gregory, and the nearby Thoor Ballylee, the tower Yeats bought; the lake isle of Innisfree; and Yeats's grave at Drumcliff, under Ben Bulben. Norman Jeffares's A New Commentary on the Poems of W. B. Yeats (PR5907.J39 1984) is the revised edition of a classic set of annotations. Two useful references are John Unterecker's A Reader's Guide to William Butler Yeats (PR5907.U5 1996), and Sam McCready's A William Butler Yeats Encyclopedia (PR5906.M44 1997) Jeffares is also the author of one of the standard biographies of Yeats, W. B. Yeats: A New Biography (PR5906.J419 1988). Richard Ellmann's Yeats: The Man and the Masks (PR5906.E4 1948) is also a standard. Two recent biographies are Terence Brown's The Life of W .B. Yeats: A Critical Biography (PR5906.B76 1999), and R. F. Foster's W. B. Yeats: A Life (PR5906.F66 1997), of which the first volume has appeared: The Apprentice Mage, 1865-1914. Leon Surette's The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, and the Occult (PN56.M54 S87 1993) is a help in following through some of Yeats's fascination with the occult and the ways in which this informs his poetry. The place to go for details on this is of course Yeats's own A Vision (PR5904 .V5). The automatic script which Georgie Yeats produced, supposedly under the direction of spirits, has all been preserved, and Yeats's Vision Papers are now available in three volumes (PR5904.V53 H37 1992-), under the general editorship of George Mills Harper. See also Harper's The Making of Yeats's A Vision: A Study of the Automatic Script (PR5904.V53 H37 1987-). And here's a surprise: the Order of the Golden Dawn is not only alive and well, it has its own website, including (though that's hardly a surprise) a brief biography of its most famous member. For the political background to Yeats's poetry, see Malcom Brown's The Politics of Irish Literature: from Thomas Davis to W. B. Yeats (DA950.B76 1972)/ by Malcolm Brown. Lucy McDiarmid's Saving Civilization: Yeats, Eliot, and Auden Between the Wars (PR605.S6 M38 1984) and Elizabeth Cullingford's Yeats, Ireland and Fascism (PR5908.P6 C8 1981) are both good on Yeats's politics in the 1930s. The Yeats Society Sligo has some good brief information on Yeats's life, career and poetry, with archival images and online versions of a number of poems, as well as a "poetry tour" of the Sligo district of west Ireland which was so important to Yeats, juxtaposing the poetry with photographs of the landscape. There are a few sound files of Yeats on the Web. The Academy of American Poets (go figure) has a sound file of him reciting the early poem "The Lake Isle of Innisfree", which is also on your Norton CD. It's worth hearing Yeats's characteristic style of intoning. And the BBC sound archives have files of Yeats talking about World War I, Eliot, and modern poetry, all taken from the National Lecture on Modern Poetry he gave on 11 Oct 1936. The Norton CD also has Benjamin Britten's setting of "Down by the Salley Gardens". For etexts, Project Bartleby has many of Yeats's poems, but this site, whose author is unidentified, has a much more complete version of the collected poems. And just in case
you were wondering (and want to be one jump ahead of Yeats himself), here
is a brief guide to the pronunciation
of Irish names. Take a guess: just how do you pronounce Cuchulain,
Conchubar, Niamh, and Slieve Suidhe Laighen?
And here's an even
more thorough Beginner's
Guide to Gaelic Pronunciation. |
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The
contents of these pages are © 2005, The University of Queensland,
Queensland, Australia 4072 |
W.
B. Yeats