W. B. Yeats: A Life Vol.2: II: The Arch-Poet 1915-1939 - Rilegato

Foster, R. F.

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0198184654 ISBN 13: 9780198184652

Casa editrice: OUP Oxford, 2003

Riassunto

The acclaimed first volume of this definitive biography of W. B. Yeats left him in his fiftieth year, at a cross-roads in his life. The subsequent quarter-century surveyed in The Arch-Poet takes in his rediscovery of advanced nationalism and his struggle for an independent Irish culture, his continued pursuit of supernatural truths through occult experimentation, his extraordinary marriage, and a series of tumultuous love affairs. Throughout he was writing his greatest poems, from the stark simplicity of 'The Fisherman' and 'The Wild Swans at Coole', through the magnificent complexities of the sequences reflecting the Troubles and Civil War and the Byzantium poems, to the radical compression of his last work - some of it literally written on his deathbed.

The drama of his life is mapped against the history of the Irish revolution and the new Irish state founded in 1922. Yeats's many political roles and his controversial involvement in a right-wing movement during the early 1930s are covered more closely than ever before, and his complex and passionate relationship with the developing history of his country remains a central theme. Throughout this book, the genesis, alteration, and presentation of his work (memoirs and polemic as well as poetry) is explored through his private and public life. The enormous and varied circle of Yeats's friends, lovers, family, collaborators, and antagonists inhabit and enrich a personal world of astounding energy, artistic commitment, and verve. Yeats constantly re-created himself and his work, believing that art was 'not the chief end of life but an accident in one's search for reality': a search which brought him again and again back to his governing preoccupations: sex and death. He also held that 'all knowledge is biography', a belief reflected in this study of one of the greatest lives of modern times.

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Recensione

Foster, a historian with a great literary sensibility, masterfully tells the story of W.B. Yeats, and the whole landscape of the poet emerges afresh. (Ken'ichi Matsumura, Journal of Irish Studies)

... excellent and exhaustive biography. (Contemporary Review)

'Magisterial' and 'monumental' are the words for which one reaches in awed response to this second volume of Roy Foster's biography of Yeats. Yet such routine blurb epithets hardly convey the book's special strengths; suppleness, subtlety, patience might come closer. What is remarkable is the tenacity and skill with which the historian has stuck to his task. (Irish Studies Review)

The rich, messy, complicated, heroic and ignoble life of Yeats is all here ... Above all, [Foster] shows throughout how, with Yeats, the life generated the poetry and the poetry animated the life. (Irish Studies Review)

Foster has an eye and an ear for poetry to match his special skills as historian and biographer. For all of us who care about Yeats he has done a great service; this is a book we will be revisiting again and again. (Irish Studies Review)

This is a hugely absorbing, meticulously researched, stately biography of a great and peculiar man that illuminates, without explaining, the mystery of his creativity. For lovers of his work, it is an essential companion to the poetry. (Winston-Salem Journal (USA))

Roy Foster has quite magnificently done his best to help us reach into and read W. B. Yeats. To recommend this book to others is an honour. (The Globe and Mail (Canada))

It is hard to know which to admire the more: the unravelling of Yeats's own politics or the historian's understanding of the new Ireland. (Michael Foot, Books of the Year, Observer Review)

The treatment afforded Leda and the Swan can be taken as a touchstone of the book's method and manner. Dilligent, thorough, unobstructed by jargon or modishness, careful with the details of both the life and any poem under consideration, measured and intelligent in its readings and criticism, this is a model approach to literary biography. (The Globe and Mail (Canada))

... for those who think the poetry of Yeats one of the great inheritances of the century now mercifully finished, the second instalment of the mighty work of University of Oxford historian R. F. Foster is welcome. (The Globe and Mail, Canada)

L'autore

Roy Foster is Carroll Professor of Irish History at the University of Oxford, and a fellow of Hertford College. Professor Foster has written widely on Irish history, society and politics in the modern period, as well as on Victorian high politics and culture, and his publications include Lord Randolph Churchill: a Political Life (Oxford, 1981), Modern Ireland 1600-1972 (London, 1988), and The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making it up in Ireland (London, 2001). The first volume of this biography, W.B. Yeats, A Life. I: The Apprentice Mage 1865-1914 was published by OUP in 1997.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: OUP Oxford
• Data di pubblicazione: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0198184654
• ISBN 13: 9780198184652
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero edizione: 1
• Numero di pagine: 856