Yeats and Modern Poetry

Scholars and critics commonly align W. B. Yeats with Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot and the modernist movement at large. This incisive study from renowned poetry critic Edna Longley argues that Yeats' presence and influence in modern poetry have been sorely misunderstood. Longley disputes the value of modernist critical paradigms and suggests alternative perspectives for interpreting Yeats - perspectives based on his own criticism, and on how Ireland shaped both his criticism and his poetry. Close readings of particular poems focus on structure, demonstrating how radically Yeats' approach to poetic form differs from that of Pound and Eliot. Longley discusses other twentieth-century poets in relation to Yeats' insistence on tradition, and offers valuable insights into the work of Edward Thomas, Wallace Stevens, Wilfred Owen, Hugh MacDiarmid, W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, Geoffrey Hill, Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes. Her postscript addresses key issues in contemporary poetry by taking a fresh look at Yeats's enduring legacy.</jats:p

Louis MacNeice: aspects of his aesthetic theory and practice

I am going to discuss certain aspects of MacNeice’s aesthetic as theorised in his prose and practised in his poetry. But some of the poems themselves include explicit or implicit literary criticism; and I will particularly refer to three of his "eclogues" in this connection. These poems might be termed "colloques" on MacNeice’s poetry. My overall theme will be MacNeice’s continual drive to reconcile the demands of form and content — or of "colour" and "meaning" as "When We Were Children" puts..

Michael Robartes and the Dancer

Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921) is an odd combination of ballad-history and epithalamion. Its oddity stems from Yeats's caution about publishing his 1916 poems. These lie like his metaphorical stone amidst marriage-poems written up to three years later. Further, both the ballad-history and the epithalamion breach their own conventions. The former is less faithful to Ireland, and the latter to monogamy than is usually the case. Yet the book's incongruities, both historical and literary,..