Yeats's Ghosts Brenda Maddox (Author)
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Yeats, William Butler
Brenda Maddox, the award-winning, world-renowned biographer, looks at one of the towering literary figures of the twentieth century, W.B. Yeats, through the lens of the Automatic Script, the trancelike communication with supposed spirits that he and his much younger wife, George, conducted during the early years of their marriage. The full transcript of this intense occult adventure was not available until 1992 and remains virtually untouched by biographers. The vision papers covered more than 3,600 pages of writing, symbols and obsure diagrams penned by Yeats's wife during their 450 sitting of automatic writing. Maddox finds the scripts to have been a ghostly form of family planning--as well as one of the most ingenious ploys ever used by a wife to take her husband's mind off another woman. This revealing biography flashed back to Yeats's early years (1865-1900), to the least-examined important woman in his life: his silent, dreamy mother, whose Irish ghost stories steered him into his occultist path. The book then returns to the mature Yeats, to analyze, with new information and a sharp feminine perspective, his public career in Ireland, his sexual rejuvenation operation and his obsession with several younger women--and related them all the triumph of his late poetry. While much has been written about Yeats, until now no one has managed to convey the humane nature of the man and get behind the "smiling public man" to expose the intense privacy and passions of a powerful and often misunderstood artist.
- Rank: #327881 in Books
- Published on: 1999-08
- Format: Bargain Price
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Hardcover
- 474 pages
Description #1 by eBay - unbeatablesales:
Fantasy and Horror Classics 9781447405979 Rosa Alchemica - Some Ghost Stories from WB Yeats (Fantasy and Horror Classics) Description WB Yeats is one of the foremost figures of Irish literature, and in 1923 was the first Irish recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Here are collected five of his finest ghost stories, including Rosa Alchemica, The Sorcerers, and The Wisdom of the King. *Author: Yeats, William Butler *Binding Type: Paperback *Number of Pages: 50 *Publication Date: 201
Description #2 by LoadLib:
Review "Majestic.... In Saddlemyer, George Yeats has found a biographer perfectly suited to her.... Steeped in its subject, [the book] also provides an excellent, detailed portrait of the poet's life in his last two decades, far better than Yeats' own biographers have done. Becoming George is a delight to read: authoritative, sympathetic and insightful, it stands as a refreshing contrast to the overheated 'Yeats's Ghosts' (1999).... This is good, straightforward, old-fashioned biography, packed with information and useful for the Yeats aficionado and the novice reader alike."--Martin Rubin, The San Francisco Chronicle"Ann Saddlemyer has written a profound, exhaustive, and richly evocative life of this truly remarkable woman.... In drawing her subject forward into the light Saddlemyer has exercised an admirable discretion and sense of balance along with an almost fierce devotion to the facts. Becoming George is...the product, surely, of a lifetime of study and thought and discrimination. As a young scholar...Saddlemyer came to know George Yeats, and was a good friend of her daughter Anne, and the warmth of affection for George and the Yeats family permeates the book and brings it to life."--John Banville, The New York Review of Books"Saddlemyer has at last delivered the life of this remarkable woman in encyclopaedic detail.... Saddlemyer is gratifyingly frank in discussing Georgie's psychological make-up."--Brenda Maddox, The Guardian"Saddlemyer's wise, majestic biography...is a masterpiece, an extraordinary achievement."--The Globe and Mail"Advanced reader will appreciate the copious endnotes and a view of a side Yeats absent from other biographies"--Choice"Uncommonly readable, marked by an acuity of emotional and literary insight...fun to read." --The NationAbout the AuthorAnn Saddlemyer is Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto. She is one of the General Editors of the Cornell Yeats series (publishing the MSS of the entire Yeats canon); and on the editorial boards of the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, the Irish Studies Review , the Irish University Review , the Correspondence of Bernard Shaw, and the Shaw Annual; and co-founder of the journal Theatre Research in Canada. She was awarded the British Academy's Rose Mary Crawshay Award for Criticism for her Collected Letters of John Millington Synge (OUP).
Description #3 by DeepDiscount:
Prefaces and Introductions, Volume VI of The Collected Works of WB Yeats, brings together for the first time thirty-two introductions by Yeats to the works of such literary greats as William Blake, JM Synge, Lady Gregory, Oscar Wilde, Oliver St. John Gogarty, Lionel Johnson, and Rabindranath Tagore. The introductions, which span the Nobel laureate's entire career, reflect the broad reach of Yeats's literary and cultural interests. Writing of fairies, ghosts, and witches in his introduction to Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, Yeats discovers that they were still extant in Ireland, at least in 1888, "giving gifts to the kindly, and plaguing the surly." In his preface to Stories from Carleton he tells of that sweetest ginger of Gaelic tunes, Mary Carleton, who was once asked to sing the air "The Red-haired Man's Wife" and replied: "I will sing for you, but the English words and the air are like a quarreling man and wife. The Irish melts into the tune: the English does not." And in distinguishing the Irish from the English poets of his day in A Treasury of Irish Poetry in the English Tongue, Yeats remarks: "Contemporary Irish poets believe in spiritual life, invisible and troubling, and express their belief in their poetry. Contemporary English poets are interested in the glory, the order, the passion or the pleasure of the world." Always insightful and often charming, Prefaces and Introductions reveals the breadth of Yeats's talent as essayist, critic, folklorist, and raconteur.
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