Eminent Irish historian meets eminent Irish poet, continuing the
massive biography begun nearly seven years ago. Foster
(History/Oxford Univ.; The Irish Story, 2002, etc.) carries on with
a number of themes that occupied The Apprentice Mage (1997):
William Butler Yeats's long infatuation with the Celtic bohemian
Maud Gonne, his infatuations with many other women, his researches
in the psychic and paranormal, and, above all, his refusal to be
easily categorized in either poetry or politics, his twin
vocations. Foster begins with Yeats in turning-point 1915, when he
turned 50 and was beginning to tire of life in wartime London,
writing of England's war with Germany, "It is merely the most
expensive outbreak of insolence and stupidity the world has ever
seen, and I give it as little of my thought as I can." Things were
no quieter in Ireland, where, soon afterward, the Easter
Uprising-the subject of some of Yeats's most memorable poems-broke
out, followed by civil war and the difficult birth of the Irish
Free State. Back home, Yeats positioned himself, Foster shows, not
quite on the sidelines, but certainly at some distance from the
sloganeers on either side, and he did not please his nominal fellow
nationalists ("whose strict Sinn Fein platitudes," Foster sniffs,
"seem[ed] bathetically ill attuned to the necessities of modern
compromise") by insisting that true Irish culture owed as much to
Anglo-Norman as Celtic influences. Tweaking simpler-minded politics
in his "Crazy Jane" poems, Yeats goes on, in Foster's account, to
poke about in less attractive corners of politics, expressing
occasional admiration for the totalitarians across the sea; but
mostly, having won the Nobel Prize, he retreats, slowly, into
revered and grand-old-man-of-poetry status, getting himself in more
trouble on the homefront than in the public sphere. Foster wisely
lets Yeats's poetry speak for itself, though he ably deconstructs
the bard's songs in light of contemporary events, and he provides
an extraordinarily thorough context for scholars of a more strictly
literary bent-and all in entirely readable, deeply nuanced fashion.
"We may come at last," Yeats once remarked, "to think that all
knowledge is biography." Foster's knowing, richly detailed
investigation is a remarkable achievement, essential to serious
students of Yeats's life and work. (Kirkus Reviews)
The second and final volume in Roy Foster's acclaimed biography of W. B. Yeats covers the second half of Yeats's life, taking in his controversial political involvements, continued supernatural experiments, his extraordinary marriage, a series of love affairs, and the writing of his greatest poetry. Life and work are woven closely together to create a rich, new, uniquely authoritative, and immensely involving treatment of one of the greatest lives of modern times.
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