Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
W. B. Yeats
-
Standard Name: Yeats, W. B.
Used Form: William Butler Yeats
Used Form: Willie Yeats
WBY
, who began publishing well before the end of the nineteenth century, is regarded as one of the most important twentieth-century poets in English, and one of the most international of Irish writers. He was early involved in the Irish Literary Revival, and wrote early, highly romantic lyrics on Celtic and fairy themes. Later he made poetry out of the search for a poetic language. Some of his later work is affected by his interest in the occult.
Bernard Shaw
saw Lady Gregory as a born playwright . . . . doomed from the cradle to write for the stage, to break through every social obstacle to get to the stage, to refuse...
Residence
Sylvia Plath
SP
found that William Butler Yeats
's former flat in Fitzroy Road, London, was available for rent, and she moved into it with her children.
Hayman, Ronald. The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath. Heinemann, 1991.
171-3
Textual Features
Eva Gore-Booth
W. B. Yeats
claimed a central influence on EGB
's understanding of Celtic legend, though she was already thinking about it to a degree during her adolescence. In a letter to novelist Olivia Shakespear
...
Textual Features
Margaret Kennedy
It was Kennedy's win in the poetry category of the competition, however, that singled out her seriousness about writing. She won on the judgment of W. B. Yeats
, who adjudicated the poetry competition.
Powell, Violet. The Constant Novelist. W. Heinemann, 1983.
30
Textual Features
Seamus Heaney
Setting out to enable his readers to witness the spectacle of a gifted writer becoming a definitive one, he begins by considering poetic theories of sound and meaning held by Frost
, Eliot
, and...
Textual Features
Augusta Gregory
The book, which includes two essays and notes by Yeats
, consists of stories (grouped into chapters according to their subject-matter) collected between 1890 and 1910 in Galway, Clare, and the Aran Islands...
Textual Features
Philip Larkin
As an undergraduate Larkin was naturally still finding his voice. One poem dating from probably 1943 has its title and its lesbian topic from Charles Baudelaire
: Femmes Damnées. Larkin's poem of this title...
Textual Features
Emily Hickey
The collection contains, among other pieces, three narrative poems, one of which, The Ballad of Lady Ellen, shows the influence of William Butler Yeats
. Several sonnets here employ the Italian form. Sources note...
Textual Features
Katharine Tynan
They show increasing awareness of time and time's passing: in this volume KT
expresses regret for having missed, by her absence in England, the last moments of some of her Irish friends' lives. Nearly all...
Textual Features
Philip Larkin
The title poem is a composite, comprising a Legend in the form of a ballad, and four songs positioned further and further northwards. The ballad opens: I saw three ships go sailing by. One sails...
Textual Features
Dora Marsden
Marsden was neither unaware nor entirely appreciative of Pound's intellectual programme or his professional ethics. She told Weaver
in a letter of November 1913 (after the journal had again been relaunched with a new name)...
Textual Features
Katharine Tynan
She limited her selection to Irish lyrical poetry of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, excluding political poems and poems either derived from English or already well-known to English audiences. Her wide range of poets included...
Textual Features
John Millington Synge
It was his first three-act play. Like Riders to the Sea, it drew its inspiration from the folklore of the Aran Islands. It was published at the end of the same year, in...
Textual Features
Kathleen Raine
The essay demonstrates connections between Jungian psychology (reaffirming the existence of an archetypal world) and the traditional symbolic language used by poets such as Milton
, Shelley
, Blake
, and Yeats
.
Textual Features
Anne Stevenson
Despite the strong emotion expressed in some of these poems, AS
later remembered the volume as setting free her gift for irony.
Stevenson, Anne. Between the Iceberg and the Ship. University of Michigan Press, 1998.
126
The final poem, A Legacy, On my Fiftieth Birthday, is written...