Imagining Ireland in the Poems and Plays of W. B. Yeats

An important part of the national imaginary, Yeat's work has helped to invent the nation of Ireland, while critiquing the modern state that emerged from it's revolutionary period. This study offers a chronological account of Yeat's volumes of poetry, contextualizing and analyzing them in light of Irish cultural and political history.  

'Bradley draws on recent work in postcolonialism, but most interestingly reads Yeats in the light of Walter Benjamin, not the critic most think of in connection with Yeats's politics. This clearly written, carefully argued book will benefit a wide range of readers. Highly recommended.' - Choice

"It is the rare book on any poet that offers theoretically informed post-colonial readings as well as close analysis of meter and verse form. Bradley'sImagining Ireland in the Poems and Plays of W. B. Yeatsincludes comprehensivediscussions of Yeats's Ireland in all its cultural, social, and political dimensions. But the focus remains always on the way Yeats responds poetically to the many varieties of Irishness: old Irish legends, popular nationalist poetry, Anglo-Irish tradition,United Irish patriots and martyrs,Free State censorship, and the fulminations of bishops against naughty behavior at dancehalls.The wealth of detail, lucid prose style, and balanced presentation of complex materials make this a superb book that new and old Yeatsians will learn from." - Lucy McDiarmid, Marie Frazee-Baldassarre Professor of English, Montclair State University

"Bradley's exciting new book brings a lifetime's engagement with Irish literature and a liberal familiarity with studies of Yeats, modernism, and twentieth-century history to bear on Yeats's work. But in the end, Bradley speaks out of his personally coherent and humane sense of life. The readings of the great poems are his own, and they are deep. Especially exciting is the novel pairing of Yeats and Walter Benjamin as modernist European intellects between the Wars, searching, while history rushes bloodily upon them, for a vision of a new great community. Bradley is able to articulate both what is charming and what is frightening in Yeats and in nationalism. Readers will be grateful to find that this learned book is clearly and elegantly written." - Adrian Frazier, National University of Ireland at Galway

 

ANTHONY BRADLEY Professor of English at the University of Vermont, USA.