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“... my impression that some of the Northern poets still hope to present MacNeice, not indeed as their Yeats or Joyce, but as their Kavanagh – a poet who seemed inspiring to his juniors, and available to them as Yeats and Joyce never were. Seamus Heaney, for instance, has written of Kavanagh in terms which I can’t see ...”

“... In July 1933, at the height of his involvement with the Blueshirts, the Irish Fascist organisation, Yeats wrote: ‘It is amusing to live in a country where men will always act. Where nobody is satisfied with thought … The chance of being shot is raising everybody’s spirits enormously.’ However invigorating the prospect, the fulfilment did not come ...”

“... In 1979, in a preface to a new edition of Yeats: The Man and the Masks, Richard Ellmann wrote about 46 Palmerston Road in Rathmines in Dublin, where George Yeats lived between her husband’s death in 1939 and her own death almost thirty years later. Mrs Yeats lived, Ellmann wrote, among the dead poet’s papers ...”

“... exacerbate the question of land and cause war between landowner and peasant. In Paris he joined Yeats and Maud Gonne in the Association Irlandaise and stayed in it as long as its talk sounded harmless, but when Maud’s journal L’Irlande Libre looked as if it would take the libre literally, he resigned from the association and told her he wouldn’t ...”

“... crusty military traditions. A review of books about the most ‘magical’ of modern poets, W.B. Yeats, concludes with the distinctly crusty remark that one of them contains ‘the only photograph of Maud Gonne which has ever made me understand how she could have been considered beautiful. On the reverse is a photograph of Constance Gore-Booth, also ...”

“... Yeats avowed it more often and more impressively, but he was not alone in his belief that Maud Gonne’s beauty was of ‘a kind not natural in an age like this’. Shaw called her ‘outrageously beautiful’ and W.T. Stead, who could no more than Yeats isolate his admiration for her looks from an appraisal of her politics, described her as ‘one of the most beautiful women in the world’, going on to point out that ‘she is for the Irish Republic and total separation, peacefully if possible, but if necessary by the sword, that of France and Russia not excepted ...”

“... it still does), a stonemason’s, in her case, while across the alley, at Number 18, W.B. Yeats had one of his London addresses. Richardson recalled seeing him standing at the window on hot summer evenings, breathing the ‘parched air’, as she called it. In his biography of the poet, Roy Foster reports that ‘the flat at Woburn Buildings was ...”

“... no place for anger in his elegant little study of the great lady. Her close association with W.B. Yeats, with nationalist aspirations, and with certain stormy evenings at the Abbey Theatre, made her famous in her day, but it seems that her day has passed. The twenty-odd volumes of her works – dramas, folklore collections, journals – are not often ...”

“... tapping, séance-gatherings and spirit-photographing were part freak-show, part parlour-game. W.B. Yeats experimented with symbols and trance-states, and for much of the 1920s was in close communication with his personal spirit-guide. Conan Doyle publicly endorsed those infamous snapshots of pathetically fey (and tragically superimposed) fairies. Media mogul ...”

“... information, analyse it, store some of it and then forget most of it, lacking all respect for what Yeats called ‘custom and ceremony’, having it in for tradition and authority, and delighted by the body’s ability to undo whatever grandeur society or the mind had constructed. Beckett’s work is at its best when he seems to forget himself, to forget his ...”

“... expected ‘fall’ would. If there is a Sarah Silverman in here, and a Bill Manhire, and a W.B. Yeats (‘What can I but enumerate old themes?’), there is also a Wes Anderson: Bird writes to be loved, to fold what is embarrassing about her temperament into what is winsome, what’s cool or cold into what’s intimate and warm. ‘What’s the point of ...”

“... for Seamus Heaney’s emergence as the most internationally-acclaimed Irish poet since W.B. Yeats. For he has demonstrated once again that there are more ways of making it new than are known to those critics of poetry who simply follow current fashions. He possesses in a high degree what Robert Lowell called ‘the grace of accuracy’, and his work ...”

“... At a seance in Hampstead in June 1914, W.B. Yeats was contacted by a spirit guide, who announced that he was Leo Africanus and professed to be affronted that the poet hadn’t heard of him. Over the next seven years, a curious relationship developed between Yeats and the daimon, who presented himself as Yeats’s opposite ...”

“... Watts and Thomas Hardy as at least as interesting as the wildness of Christopher Smart and W.B. Yeats. I’m not sure how moderate Hardy was – an amiable re-opening of this question was the subject of the postcard from Stanford – but Watts does sound like the unanxious Calvinist, the man who has made his peace with the abandonment of extravagance. In ...”

“... Are we to think that the good grey Reverend Mr Thomas is as much of an arrogant élitist as W.B. Yeats? Why yes, we are: the note is intermittent but consistent throughout Thomas’s poetry, and it does him credit. For the temptation for a Welshman is to blame the ‘plastic and trash’, or in another poem the ‘Corona and potato crisps’, upon the ...”