Product Description

Originally published in 1895, this outstanding collection of Irish verse was part of Yeats' campaign to establish a tradition of Irish poetry fit for the dawn of a new age in Ireland's history.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #711747 in Books
• Published on: 2002-07-11
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

Review
'Yeats was one of the few whose history is the history of their own time, who are a part of the consciousness of an age which cannot be understood without them.' - T.S. Eliot

From the Back Cover

With a new introduction by John Banville

‘Yeats was one of the few whose history is the history of their own time, who are a part of the consciousness of an age which cannot be understood without them.’ – T.S. Eliot

In 1895 the thirty-year-old W.B. Yeats, already established as one of Ireland’s leading poets and folklorists, published this outstanding collection of Irish verse as part of his campaign to establish a tradition of Irish poetry fit for the dawn of a new age in Ireland’s history. This edition, complete with a specially commissioned introduction by acclaimed writer and critic John Banville, is essential reading for all who appreciate good literature. First published: 1895.

About the Author
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939). One of the great poets of the modern age. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Poetry in 1923.

Customer Reviews

"On I went in sad dejection..."
"To remember that in Ireland the professional or landed classes have been through the mould of English universities, and are ignorant of the very names of the best writers in this book, is to know how strong a wind blows from the ancient legends of Ireland, how vigorous an impulse to create is in her today."

Yeats worked insistently throughout his life to create a modern national literature for Ireland, free from both the dead hand of political ideology and the wild abandonment of ballads suitable only for `a world when all was old enough to be steeped in emotion.' In this collection he presents us with poems and poets worked from just those influences, which whilst definitive for their own context had become for Yeats symbolic of `mechanism' or `weakness' in a modern writer. In his introduction he is not sparing; the earliest poets, Moore and Callanan, are `artificial' and `naive'; those of the Young Ireland set are `not of literary importance', even `insincere as they lived in half-illusions'; Mangan had done `little permanently interesting', and Ferguson is `frequently dull'.

Despite the pounding, I found the work as a whole quite effective. The focus of the earlier eighteenth century poets on defeat and lamentation sets the tone. Most of the poems are either funeral dirges to lost kings, chiefs, lovers, etc, or eulogies to past great ones whose shadows cast into relief the political realities of the time.
There's a good variety of style though despite this apparent one-dimensionality. The Burial of Sir John Moore reads with granite realism; Mangan's catalogues and Ferguson's tragic-epic Welshmen of Tirawley give a sort of classic edge. There's plenty of great Gaels throughout (some whom have an unfortunate penchant for eye-gouging) and about as many references to fairies as a man could seriously be asked to take from one volume (according to William Allingham, in his poem The Fairies, their favourite food is crispy-pancakes - which is good to know because really I'd just assumed it was Lucky Charms).

By the end of the book, with poets straying into Catholic religiosity, I began to feel how something like Ego Dominus Tuus was needed in the Ireland after the turn of the century:
"The rhetorician would deceive his neighbours,
The sentimentalist himself; while art
Is but a vision of reality."
From this volume we can see Yeats as a poet strong enough to make and remake himself by his own powers, rather than relying completely upon the contingency of reaction, or the crutch of `some fine ancient song' awaiting translation. Read it for its own merits by all means, there are some gems here, but through some Yeats I think it's more appreciable.