In this multi-volume edition, the poetry of W.B. Yeats (1865-1939) is presented in full, with newly-established texts and detailed, wide-ranging commentary.
The Poems of W. B. Yeats Volume Two: 1890-1898
August 2020
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Scholarly edition
In this multi-volume edition, the poetry of W.B. Yeats (1865-1939) is presented in full, with newly-established texts and detailed, wide-ranging commentary.
Yeats's early lake isles
January 2019
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Journal article
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Review of English Studies
W. B. Yeats’s successful early poem, ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’, reflects a general imaginative preoccupation with lakes in his writings as a young man. The poem shows evidence of the poet’s reading in both the local history of W. G. Wood-Martin’s History of Sligo (1882) and Irish mythological studies. Besides these sources, it draws (like other early material) on a symbolic geography of lakes, rivers, and seas which comes to Yeats from P. B. Shelley’s ‘Alastor’ and Walter Scott’s The Lady of the Lake. This geography is to be seen in Yeats’s very early work, such as ‘The Island of Statues’ (1884), and it influences longer-running projects such as the poetic drama The Shadowy Waters through the 1890s. Other early poems, ‘The Stolen Child’, ‘The Danaan Quicken Tree’, and ‘To an Isle in the Water’ help to clarify the symbolic uses of lakes, and show also how far Yeats was indebted both to Romantic predecessors and to contemporaries such as Katharine Tynan. With ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ Yeats makes decisive use of both images and metrical motifs (which may derive ultimately from Keats) in rendering a specific location as a symbolic locus for his own early anxieties and ambitions.
Editing Yeats: The Widening Gyre
October 2018
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Journal article
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Essays in Criticism
Paul Muldoon 1951
November 2017
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Chapter
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The Cambridge Companion to Irish Poets
Yeats and/or Eliot: The Choice?
June 2017
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Journal article
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Agenda
Several decades ago, when I was doing the things you then had to do in order to obtain a degree in English Literature, my contemporaries and I were offered a number of options within one of our compulsory examinations. The paper had originally (I think) been called ‘Special Poets’, though it was soon to change into ‘Special Authors’ (the better, presumably, to accommodate candidates shy of tackling verse); in my time, it had very recently undergone a perhaps more important change, by ceasing to require the study of a selected pair of poets – now, instead of (say) Wordsworth and Coleridge, Milton and Spenser, or Tennyson and Browning, one could devote oneself, if one chose, to a single one of the named (and, I need hardly say, exclusively male) list. The pairing which had just been decoupled in this way, and to which I devoted my poor attention all those years ago, was ‘W.B. Yeats and/or T.S. Eliot’: offered the choice between them (and I could still, as I remember, have chosen to study them in tandem), I opted for Yeats. This sounds like the most trivial of anecdotes, not to mention the most vain, and I give it here with a due sense of its slightness in the bigger scheme of things. But the choice itself, between Yeats and Eliot, which that undergraduate curriculum had incorporated, in its own minor and relatively unimportant way, was one that had – and, I think, still has – a proper critical bearing. Here, I want to venture as cautiously as I can into the different kinds of valuations and value-judgements – about the two poets, and about what poetry is (and is not) – that have gone into both comparisons between Yeats and Eliot and – just as significantly, in my view – the inability, the reluctance, or the failure to set the two writers in meaningful relation to one another.
“A Sad and Angry Consolation’: Yeats, Landor, Hill, and an Unwritten Book’
April 2017
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Journal article
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PN Review
Boundaries and Ways between: Rhyme and the Hermetic
March 2017
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Chapter
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On Rhyme
On strong opinions: celebrity authors and the contemporary agora
February 2017
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Journal article
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Celebrity Studies
The PN Review Lecture
April 2016
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Journal article
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PN Review 229
I WANT TO CONSIDER one fairly well-known statement about poetry, and about the way we talk about things including poetry. Many will recognise its author as being W. B. Yeats:
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We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry. Unlike the rhetoricians, who get a confident voice from remembering the crowd they have won or may win, we sing amid our uncertainty; and, smitten even in the presence of the most high beauty by the knowledge of our solitude, our rhythm shudders.
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I have no idea how often the first sentence of this has been quoted over the years, but the figure must be a high one. Naturally, it has been quoted apart from its context – but pointing this out should not be taken for some game-winning production of the critical ace (‘If you read on, I think you’ll find that what he really means is this, and not what you are saying at all’). Yeats’s remarks come from his short prose book Per Amica Silentia Lunae, written in 1917 and published simultaneously in London and New York on 18th January, 1918. To translate those dates into the author’s age, the work was written when Yeats was fifty-one, and published when he was fifty-two years old. He had been publishing poetry since he was nineteen years of age, and critical prose since he was twenty-one, so his statement here has a good deal of time and experience behind it. Yeats by this ...
Herne the Hunter
February 2016
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Book
Herne the Hunter is the sixth collection from one of Ireland's most accomplished lyric poets. In this new body of work, Peter McDonald deepens his interest in myth and storytelling through the legend of Herne, a phantom huntsman of English folklore. In McDonald's poetic treatment of the legend, opposing forces are held in tension: body and soul, present and past, possession and desire, death and life. The collection's two-part structure causes the poems to reflect and distort in a version of what Yeats called 'a troubled mirror': a sequence of Petrarchan sonnets is set against a Shakespearean sonnet sequence; stanzaic poems, shorter pieces, and longer compositions also meet their own images across the book, resulting in a complex symmetry of forms. Subjects in these poems stretch from game animals to Japanese swords, and from tree-catalogues to the constellations. The volume draws energy from struggles between irreconcilable imperatives, especially the need for pursuit and the desperation for escape, and the intimacy between the hunter and the hunted. McDonald's Herne - not quite man, nor spirit, nor beast - opens up a world in which time is felt 'passing through blood', in which one might listen to 'the cries of stones', where 'the weather is the news, and like the news / it has no meaning'.
Poetry
The Homeric Hymns
February 2016
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Book
A 2016 Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation. The Homeric Hymns are a crucial work in the Western literary canon, and Peter McDonald's new verse translations offer the major modern account of this still under-appreciated body of ancient poetry. The thirty-three 'hymns' are poetic accounts of ancient Greek gods, including Apollo, Dionysus, Aphrodite, Zeus, and Poseidon. Some of the poems are micro-epics in their own right, recounting the lives and affairs of the divine; taken together, they form a meditation on the primal themes of love, war, betrayal, desire, and paternity, and contemplate the dangerous proximity of gods and men. The book includes a new translation of the 'Life of Homer', a narrative incorporating the shorter poems known as Homer's Epigrams, attributed to Pseudo-Herodotus. Two appendices provide verse translations of episodes from Homer's Odyssey and Hesiod's Theogony, while McDonald gives fresh versions throughout of relevant passages from Pindar, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and other Greek poets. The accompanying notes and commentaries on the poems are the most generous and authoritative of any translation. This book revives an ancient classic for the twenty-first century.
Ancient Greek poetry, Translation
Quelle littérature ? Quelle démocratie ? Quel espace public ?
January 2016
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Journal article
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Communications
Quelle littérature ? Quelle démocratie ? Quel espace public ? Les leçons de l'année 1988 en Afrique du Sud Cet article analyse la confrontation tendue entre Nadine Gordimer et John Maxwell Coetzee sur Les Versets sataniques de Salman Rushdie dans les derniers temps de l'apartheid en Afrique du Sud. Il pointe la pertinence particulière de leurs différences d'opinion, centrées sur les questions de littérature, de démocratie et d'espace public, dans les débats actuels sur la liberté d'expression.<br/><br/> Whose literature ? Whose democracy ? Which public space ? The lessons of 1988 in South Africa This article reflects on a fraught confrontation over Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses (1988) between Nadine Gordimer and John Maxwell Coetzee in the dying days of apartheid in South Africa. It argues that their differences of opinion, which centred on the questions of literature, democracy and public space, have a particular relevance to contemporary debates about the freedom of expression.
Victorian Yeats
January 2013
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Chapter
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The Oxford Companion to Victorian Poetry
Collected Poems
September 2012
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Book
'But to my task': Work, Truth, and Metre in Later Hill
June 2012
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Chapter
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Geoffrey Hill
A collection of scholarly essays on Geoffrey Hill, including pioneering work by Rowan Williams and Christopher Ricks, which provides insights into the cultural, literary, political, and theological complexities of a figure thought by many ...
Literary Criticism
Geoffrey Hill: Essays on his Later Work
January 2012
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Book
Our Lost Lives: Protestantism and Northern Irish Poetry
January 2012
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Chapter
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The Oxford Companion to Modern Irish Poetry
Sound Intentions: The Workings of Rhyme in 19th Century Poetry
January 2012
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Book
Yeats’s Canons
January 2010
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Journal article
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Essays in Criticism
Tennyson’s Dying Fall
January 2009
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Chapter
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Tennyson Among the Poets: Bicentenary Essays
The Touch of a Blind Man: Forms, Origins, and Hermeneutics’ in Poetry’
January 2008
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Chapter
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Irish Poetry after Feminism: A Collection of Critical essays
William Wordsworth: Poetry and Repose
January 2008
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Chapter
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Literary Milieux: Essays in Text and Context Presented to Howard Erskine-Hill
Serious Poetry Form and Authority from Yeats to Hill
January 2007
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Book
Peter McDonald offers a controversial reading of twentieth-century British and Irish poetry centred on six figures, all of whom are critics as well as poets: W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, Seamus Heaney, and Geoffrey ...
Literary Criticism
The House of Clay
January 2007
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Book
In this book, Peter McDonald presents a collection of poems, containing lyrics which combine the resonance of narrative and imagery with formal concentration.
Poetry
Pastorals
August 2004
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Book
Paul Muldoon Critical Essays
January 2004
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Book
The essays in this book testify to the fascination of Paul Muldoon's poems, and also to their underlying contentiousness.
Literary Criticism
Mistaken Identities Poetry and Northern Ireland
January 1997
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Book
In a series of subtle and illuminating readings, Mistaken Identities shows how the best poets fromNorthern Ireland have made an issue of poetic form, and establishes the significance of this for post-nationalist criticism on both sides of ...
Literary Criticism
Adam's Dream
January 1996
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Book
Throughout the book, in both the shorter poems and the longer pieces of dramatic monologue, as well as in the closing sequence of sonnets, McDonald dwells on subtle and troubling themes of reproduction, forgery and decay, inhabiting past ...
Poetry
Selected Plays of Louis MacNeice
January 1993
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Book
The volume comprises MacNeice's famous The Dark Tower, published here for the first time in its third and final version; the saga play They Met on Good Friday and the parable The Mad Islands, both of which use explicitly Irish subject ...
Drama
Louis MacNeice The Poet in His Contexts
January 1991
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Book
The book examines MacNeice's conception of parable as key imaginative response to these influences, and it includes the first study of the poet's revealing and little-known early writings.
Literary Criticism
Biting the Wax
January 1989
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Book
Poetry
Christina Rossetti and Repetition
Conference paper
Lives of the Poets:I :’Faults’ and ’Impartial Criticism’