Yeats's Worlds: Ireland, England and the Poetic Imagination

In this lavishly illustrated scholarly analysis of Nobel Prize-winning poet and dramatist William Butler Yeats (1865- 1939), Pierce (James Joyce's Ireland), a lecturer in English at the Univ. College of Ripon and York St. John, places a greater emphasis on his subject's connection to England than earlier studies have. Although Yeats was born in Ireland and was a leader of the 1890s' Irish Literary Revival, he spent a large part of his life in England, mingled easily in upper-class English social and cultural circles and married an English wife, Georgina (George) Hyde-Lees. Drawing on unpublished letters, old newspaper reports and other primary sources, the author provides a cultural context for his subject's Anglo-Irish identity. Although Pierce covers Yeats's love affair with Irish nationalist Maud Gonne, he focuses more on the previously unacknowledged influence of George on her husband's writings and on his career as an Irish senator. Pierce also examines the fascist sympathies Yeats displayed during his last years. (Jan.)