Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-s2hrs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-09T09:12:11.378Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

5 - The later poetry

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 January 2007

Marjorie Howes
Affiliation:
Boston College, Massachusetts
John Kelly
Affiliation:
St John's College, Oxford
Get access

Summary

If we arbitrarily divide Yeats's fifty-four years of publishing into thirds, “late Yeats” would cover the years 1920-39. By 1920, when he was fifty-five, Yeats felt that his heart had grown old (as he said in “The Wild Swans at Coole”). He had given up his hope to marry Maud Gonne (to whom he had proposed, for the last time, in 1916), had married George Hyde Lees, had become a father at the birth of his daughter Anne, and, when lecturing in America, had seen his failing father for the last time (J. B. Yeats died in 1922). Yeats had already moved into a retrospective mode by writing, in 1914, the first of his autobiographical essays, called Reveries over Childhood and Youth, to be followed, in 1922, by The Trembling of the Veil. He was spending summer weeks in his tower at Ballylee, making it his symbol of age, endurance, fortitude, and wide observational power. He and his wife were ardently pursuing the practice of automatic writing, which had led, in 1918, to the first sketch - called Per Amica Silentia Lunae - of the occult materials that would receive their fullest form in the 1926 publication of A Vision.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2006

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×