From 1888 to 1892 W.B.Yeats contributed a series of essays on literature and Irish folklore to two American newspapers, the Boston Pilot and Providence Sunday Journal. These important but little-known pieces show his intense engagement with current books, plays, personalities and controversies. They also make major statements about the issues of cultural nationalism and theatrical reform that preoccupied the poet. Newly edited, annotated, and introduced by George Bornstein and Hugh Witemeyer, Letters to the New Island offers a fresh glimpse of Yeats as an active polemicist, critic and all-round man of letters.

The two great Yeats Family Sales of 2017 and the legacy of the Yeats family’s 80-year tradition of generosity to Ireland’s great cultural institutions provide the kaleidoscope through which these advanced research essays find their theme. Hannah Sullivan’s brilliant history of Yeats’s versecraft challenges Poundian definitions of Modernism; Denis Donoghue offers unique family memories of 1916 whilst tracing the political significance of the Easter Rising; Anita Feldman addresses Yeats’s responses to the Rising’s appropriation of his symbols and myths, the daring artistry of his ritual drama developed from Noh, his poetry of personal utterance, and his vision of art as a body reborn rather than a treasure preserved amid the testing of the illusions that hold civilizations together in ensuing wars. Warwick Gould looks at Yeats as founding Senator in the new Free State, and his valiant struggle against the literary censorship law of 1929 (with its present-day legacy of Irish anti-blasphemy law still presenting a constitutional challenge). Drawing on Gregory Estate documents, James Pethica looks at the evictions which preceded Yeats’s purchase of Thoor Ballylee in Galway; Lauren Arrington looks back at Yeats, Ezra Pound, and the Ghosts of The Winding Stair (1929) in Rapallo. Having co-edited both versions of A Vision, Catherine Paul offers some profound reflections on ‘Yeats and Belief’. Grevel Lindop provides a pioneering view of Yeats’s impact on English mystical verse and on Charles Williams who, while at Oxford University Press, helped publish the Oxford Book of Modern Verse. Stanley van der Ziel looks at the presence of Shakespeare in Yeats’s Purgatory. William H. O’Donnell examines the vexed textual legacy of his late work, On the Boiler while Gould considers the challenge Yeats’s intentionalism posed for once-fashionable post-structuralist editorial theory. John Kelly recovers a startling autobiographical short story by Maud Gonne. While nine works of current biographical, textual and literary scholarship are reviewed, Maud Gonne is the focus of debate for two reviewers, as are Eva Gore-Booth, Constance and Casimir Markievicz, Rudyard Kipling, David Jones, T. S. Eliot and his presence on the radio.

This is the first dictionary to identify, chart, and explain in context the many proper names and place names that so famously enrich the poetry of William Butler Yeats and, just as famously, anchor that poetry to Ireland. In compiling this work, Lester I. Conner has relied upon Yeats's own prose, the principal Yeats criticism, and the writings of Yeats's friends and critics. The result is a work that warmly ushers us into the poems, where we find we are not strangers after all.

This number of Yeats Annual collects the essays resulting from the University College Cork/ESB International Annual W. B. Yeats Lectures Series (2003-2008) by Roy Foster, Warwick Gould, John Kelly, Paul Muldoon, Bernard O’Donoghue and Helen Vendler. Those that were available in pamphlet form are now collectors’ items, but here is the complete series. These revised essays cover such themes as Yeats and the Refrain, Yeats as a Love Poet, Yeats, Ireland and Europe, the puzzles he created and solved with his art of poetic sequences, and his long and crucial interaction with the emerging T. S. Eliot. The series was inaugurated by a study of Yeats and his Books, which marked the gift to the Boole Library, Cork, of Dr Eamonn Cantwell’s collection of rare editions of books by Yeats (here catalogued by Crónán Ó Doibhlin). Many of the volume’s fifty-six plates offer images of artists’ designs and resulting first editions. This bibliographical theme is continued with Colin Smythe’s census of surviving copies of Yeats’s earliest separate publication, Mosada (1886) and a resultant piece by Warwick Gould on that dramatic poem’s source in the legend of The Phantom Ship. John Kelly reveals Yeats’s ghost-writing for Sarah Allgood; Geert Lernout discovers the source for Yeats’s ‘Tulka’, Günther Schmigalle unearths his surprising connexions with American communist colonists in Virginia, while Deirdre Toomey edits some new letters to the French anarchist, Auguste Hamon—all providing new annotation for standard editions. The volume is rounded with review essays by Colin McDowell (on A Vision, and Berkeley, Hone and Yeats), shorter reviews of current studies by Michael Edwards, Jad Adams and Deirdre Toomey, and obituaries of Jon Stallworthy (Nicolas Barker) and Katharine Worth (Richard Cave).

Centuries before W. B. Yeats wove Indian, Japanese, and Irish forms together in his poetry and plays, Irish writers found kinships in Asian and West Asian cultures. This book maps the unacknowledged discourse of Irish Orientalism within Ireland's complex colonial heritage.

This book comprehensively examines the relationship between literature and sculpture in the work of W. B. Yeats, drawing on extensive archival research to offer revelatory new readings of the poet. The book traces Yeats's literary and critical engagement with Celtic Revival statuary, public monuments in Dublin, the coin designs of the Irish Free State, abstract sculpture by the Vorticists and modernists, and a variety of carvings, decorative sculptures, and objets d'art. By charting Yeats's early art school education in Dublin, his attempts to raise funds for public monuments in the city, and to secure commissions for his favourite sculptors, the book documents a lifelong interest in the plastic arts. New and original readings of Yeats's poetry, drama, and prose criticism emerge from this concertedly inter-arts and interdisciplinary study.