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Conclusion

Yeats’s “A General Introduction for My Work”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 April 2024

Gregory Castle
Affiliation:
Arizona State University
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Summary

In the conclusion, I reflect on Yeats’s “A General Introduction for my Work” of 1937. It is an unusual text, meant originally to introduce his collected works but left unpublished until the posthumous Essay and Introductions (1961). It leads a negative dialectical existence, severed from its original place and left to perform a fugitive function with respect to the poet’s own oeuvre. For this reason, perhaps, it serves less as an introduction than as an epilogue, a summation of certain key ideas about revivalism, his poetry, and his occult works. Yeats sees from the vantage point of his later years that his literary style – as well as the worlds it creates in his work – could only have emerged from the bedrock of the self. Two years after Yeats composed his “General Introduction,” W. H. Auden, in his elegy “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” wrote that after his death, the poet “is scattered among a hundred cities,” part of a vital future he had to leave behind: “The words of a dead man /Are modified in the guts of the living.” It is just this sort of continuance and renewal that characterize Yeats’s revivalism and his hope for coming times.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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  • Conclusion
  • Gregory Castle, Arizona State University
  • Book: Yeats, Revival, and the Temporalities of Irish Modernism
  • Online publication: 11 April 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009411691.008
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  • Conclusion
  • Gregory Castle, Arizona State University
  • Book: Yeats, Revival, and the Temporalities of Irish Modernism
  • Online publication: 11 April 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009411691.008
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.

  • Conclusion
  • Gregory Castle, Arizona State University
  • Book: Yeats, Revival, and the Temporalities of Irish Modernism
  • Online publication: 11 April 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009411691.008
Available formats
×