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Selected Literary Criticism of Louis MacNeice 
edited by Alan Heuser.
Oxford, 279 pp., £19.50, March 1987, 0 19 818573 1
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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 ...

Blueshirt

Seamus Deane, 4 June 1981

Yeats, Ireland and Fascism 
by Elizabeth Cullingford.
Macmillan, 251 pp., £15, February 1981, 0 333 26199 2
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... 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 ...

A Djinn speaks

Colm Tóibín: What about George Yeats?, 20 February 2003

Becoming George: The Life of Mrs W.B. Yeats 
by Ann Saddlemyer.
Oxford, 808 pp., £25, September 2002, 0 19 811232 7
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... 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 ...

Rembrandt and Synge and Molly

Denis Donoghue, 1 December 1983

The Collected Letters of John Millington Synge. Vol. I: 1871-1907 
edited by Ann Saddlemyer.
Oxford, 385 pp., £30, August 1983, 0 19 812678 6
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... 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 ...

Buffers

David Trotter, 4 February 1988

Argufying: Essays on Literature and Culture 
by William Empson, edited by John Haffenden.
Chatto, 657 pp., £25, October 1987, 0 7011 3083 0
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... 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 ...

Sacrifice

Frank Kermode, 14 May 1992

The Gonne-Yeats Letters, 1893-1938 
edited by Anna MacBride White and A. Norman Jeffares.
Hutchinson, 544 pp., £25, April 1992, 0 09 174000 2
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... 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 ...

Diary

Andrew O’Hagan: A City of Prose, 4 August 2005

... 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 ...

The Sacred Cause of Idiom

Frank Kermode: Lady Gregory, 22 January 2004

Lady Gregory's Toothbrush 
by Colm Tóibín.
Picador, 127 pp., £7.99, September 2003, 0 330 41993 5
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... 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 ...

The Inner Lives of Quiet Women

Joanna Kavenna, 21 September 2000

May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian 
by Suzanne Raitt.
Oxford, 307 pp., £19.99, April 2001, 0 19 812298 5
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... 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 ...

The Built-in Reader

Colm Tóibín, 8 April 1993

Dream of Fair to Middling Women 
by Samuel Beckett, edited by Eoin O’Brien and Edith Fournier.
Black Cat, 241 pp., £18.99, November 1992, 0 7145 4212 1
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... 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 ...

On Hera Lindsay Bird

Stephanie Burt: Hera Lindsay Bird, 30 November 2017

... 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 ...

English Fame and Irish Writers

Brian Moore, 20 November 1980

Selected Poems 1956-1975 
by Seamus Heaney.
Faber, 136 pp., £3.95, October 1980, 0 571 11644 2
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Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968-1978 
by Seamus Heaney.
Faber, 224 pp., £7.95, October 1980, 0 571 11638 8
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... 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 ...

Leo’s Silences

Robert Irwin: The travels of Leo Africanus, 8 February 2007

Trickster Travels: A 16th-Century Muslim between Worlds 
by Natalie Zemon Davis.
Faber, 448 pp., £20, January 2007, 978 0 571 20256 0
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... 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 ...

In Love

Michael Wood, 25 January 1996

Essays in Dissent: Church, Chapel and the Unitarian Conspiracy 
by Donald Davie.
Carcanet, 264 pp., £25, October 1995, 1 85754 123 5
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... 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 ...

Raining

Donald Davie, 5 May 1983

Later Poems 
by R.S. Thomas.
Macmillan, 224 pp., £7.95, March 1983, 0 333 34560 6
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Thomas Hardy Annual, No 1 
edited by Norman Page.
Macmillan, 205 pp., £20, March 1983, 0 333 32022 0
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Tess of the d’Urbervilles 
by Thomas Hardy, edited by Juliet Grindle and Simon Gatrell.
Oxford, 636 pp., £50, March 1983, 0 19 812495 3
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Hardy’s Love Poems 
by Thomas Hardy, edited by Carl Weber.
Macmillan, 253 pp., £3.95, February 1983, 0 333 34798 6
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The Complete Poetical Works of Thomas Hardy. Vol. I: Wessex Poems, Poems of the Past and the Present, Time’s Laughingstocks 
edited by Samuel Hynes.
Oxford, 403 pp., £19.50, February 1983, 0 19 812708 1
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... 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 ...

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