W. B. Yeats (1865-1939)

 ECTS allocation:                   20
Teaching Faculty:                 Prof Eve Patten
Contact:                                1 x 2 hours/week in Michaelmas term

Week 8 Yeats, Ireland, symbolism
“The Stolen Child”; “The Man who Dreamed of Faeryland”
“The Song of Wandering Aengus”; “To Ireland in the Coming Times”;
“The Secret Rose”. “The symbolism of poetry” ( Essays and Introductions )
“The Celtic Element in Literature” ( Essays and Introductions )

Week 9 Irish politics and the poetry of violence
“Upon a House Shaken by the Land Agitation”; “September 1913”; “The Cold Heaven”; “An Irish Airman Foresees his Death”; “To a Wealthy Man…”; “Easter 1916”; “The Second Coming”
Per Amica Silentia Lunae ( Mythologies )
Cathleen ni Houlihan ( Plays )

Week 10 The Modernist Aesthetic
“Sailing to Byzantium”; “Meditations in Time of Civil War”; “The Tower”; “Leda and the Swan”; “Among School Children”
A Vision – book 5 (handout)

Week 11 Race, class and blood
“Blood and the Moon”; “Coole and Ballylee, 1931”; “Parnell's Funeral”; “The Municipal Gallery Revisited”. “Parnell” ( Essays and Introductions )
Introduction, The Words upon the Windowpane (handout)
Purgatory (Plays)

Week 12 Turning in on the self – last poems
“The Statues”; “Under Ben Bulben”; “Three Marching Songs”; “The Circus Animals Desertion”; “Politics”;
“A General Introduction for my work” ( Essays and Introductions )
On the Boiler (1938) (handout)

Bibliography
Primary texts
W.B.Yeats, The Poems , ed. Daniel Albright (1990)
W.B.Yeats, Selected Plays , ed. Richard Cave (1997)
W.B.Yeats Autobiographies; Essays and Introductions; Mythologies (all published by Macmillan)

Critical reading
Brown, Terence The Life of W.B.Yeats (1999)
Carey, John The Intellectuals and the Masses (1992)
Cullingford, Elizabeth Yeats, Ireland and Fascism (1981)
Gender and History in Yeats' Love Poetry (1993)
Ellmann, Richard Yeats: The Man and the Masks (revised ed, 1979)
Donoghue, Denis Yeats (1971)
Ellmann, Richard Yeats: The Man and the Masks (revised ed, 1979)
Foster, R.F. W.B.Yeats: A Life vols 1 and 2 (1997; 2003)
“ “ Words Alone: Yeats and his Inheritances (2011)
Harris, Daniel Yeats, Coole Park and Ballylee (1974)
Howes, Marjorie Yeats' Nations: Gender, Class and Irishness (1996)
Jeffares, A.N. A New Commentary on the Poems of W.B.Yeats (revised ed 1984)
Kinahan, Frank Yeats, Folklore and Occultism (1988)
Marcus, Philip Yeats and Artistic Power (1992)
North, Michael The Political Aesthetic of Yeats, Eliot and Pound (1991)
Smith, Stan The Origins of Modernism: Eliot, Pound, Yeats (1994)
Steinman, Michael Yeats' Heroic Figures: Wilde, Parnell, Swift, Casement (1983)
Toomey, Deirdre (ed), Yeats and Women: Yeats Annual Special Issue no 9 (1992)
Tratner, Michael Modernism and Mass Politics (1995)
Vendler, Helen “Technique in the Earlier Poems of W.B.Yeats”, Yeats Annual 8 (3-20)
Whitaker, Thomas Swan and Shadow: Yeats' Dialogue with History (1959)
Wood, Michael, Yeats and Violence (2010)

See also library database access to Past Masters: Collected Letters of W.B.Yeats