A Life of Learning

English and American Literature and Languag

Ways into Shakespeare's Sonnets

The Hilda Hulme Memorial Lectures were established in 1985 following a donation from Mr Mohamed Aslam in memory of his wife, Dr Hilda Hulme. The lectures are on the subject of English literature and relate to one of ‘the three fields in which Dr Hulme specialised, namely Shakespeare, language in Elizabethan drama, and the nineteenth-century novel’

The Puzzle of Sequence: Two Political Poems

Although Yeats’s multi-poem sequences are the complex end-point of his lyric experimentation, I want to consider them at this early point to establish the intellectual and emotional accumulation toward which his mature lyrics tend. These sequences, which approach a single phenomenon (civil war) or concept (vacillation) from various angles, replaced in Yeats’s ambition the narrative poems of his earlier poetic career. The famous sequences in English before Yeats had linked together poems, such..

Vacillation: Between What and What?

This essay is in memory of Derry Jeffares and his writings on Yeats, especially his Commentary on the poems, with its helpful notes and its quotations of applicable remarks by Yeats. When ‘Vacillation’ was first published (in the 1932 Cuala Press volume Words for Music Perhaps), Yeats tried to stabilize the content of the parts by affixing a title to each, each thereby becoming a stage of a vacillating journey toward wisdom and joy. His subtitles (some of them revised) were, in order: I: ‘Wha..

The Puzzle of Sequence: Two Political Poems

Although Yeats’s multi-poem sequences are the complex end-point of his lyric experimentation, I want to consider them at this early point to establish the intellectual and emotional accumulation toward which his mature lyrics tend. These sequences, which approach a single phenomenon (civil war) or concept (vacillation) from various angles, replaced in Yeats’s ambition the narrative poems of his earlier poetic career. The famous sequences in English before Yeats had linked together poems, such..