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Winner of the Tenth Annual Robert Rhodes Prize for Books on Literature 2009 and received an honorable mention by the Modernist Studies Association's 2009 committee
The Last Minstrels
Yeats and the Revival of the Bardic Arts
Ronald Schuchard
480 pages
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26 black-and-white halftones, 8 textual illustrations
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234x156mm
978-0-19-923000-6
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Hardback
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28 February 2008
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- Leading Yeats scholar Ronald Schuchard restores a lost dimension of Yeats's biography
- The definitive study of a fascinating and hitherto hidden literary, musical, and cultural moment
- Shows that Yeats's experiments with the bardic practice of chanting music to a harp were central to his approach to rhythm in verse composition
- Includes numerous photographs of Yeats, his fellow poets, and his intriguing circle of devotees to the bardic arts
Recovering a lost literary movement that was the most consuming preoccupation of W. B. Yeats's literary life and the most integral to his poetry and drama, Ronald Schuchard's The Last Minstrels provides an historical, biographical, and critical reconstruction of the poet's lifelong attempt to restore an oral tradition by reviving the bardic arts of chanting and musical speech. From the beginning of his career Yeats was determined to return the 'living voice' of the poet from exile to the centre of culture - on its platforms, stages, and streets - thereby establishing a spiritual democracy in the arts for
the non-reading as well as the reading public.
Schuchard's study enhances our understanding of Yeats's cultural nationalism, his aims for the Abbey Theatre, and his dynamic place in a complex of interrelated arts in London and Dublin. With a wealth of new archival materials, the narrative intervenes in literary history to show the attempts of Yeats and Florence Farr to take the 'new art' of chanting to Great Britain, America, and Europe, and it reveals for the first time the influence of their auditory poetics on the visual paradigm of the Imagists. The penultimate chapter examines the adjustments Yeats made for his movement during the war, including chanting and other adaptations from Noh drama for his dance plays and choruses, until the practice of his
'unfashionable art' became dormant in the 1920s before the restless rise of realism. The final chapter resurrects his heroic effort in the 1930s to reunite poetry and music and reconstitute his dream of a spiritual democracy through the medium of public broadcasting.Readership: Students and scholars of Yeats, literary Modernism, Irish cutural studies, and theatre studies; those with an interest in poetry performance and oral tradition
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Ronald Schuchard, Goodrich C. White Professor of English and Irish Studies, Emory University
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"provides a detailed and fascinating narrative ... insightful and meticulously researched ... The LastMinstrels: Yeats and the Revival of the Bardic Arts is essential to our understanding of modern literature and of W. B. Yeats. This is an impressive capstone work that only a scholar of Schuchard's stature, skills, and background in Yeats, Eliot, and modern literature could have written." - Mary Helen Thuente, Modern Philology "...in this extraordinary book, something previously regarded as a minor aspect of Yeat's antiquarian oddity turns out, rather amazingly, to be central to the development of poetry in the early 20th century." - THES "There is no doubt that this book represents an important
contribution to Yeats studies, and opens up interesting avenues of scholarship when it comes to the story of modernist poetry. No doubt too that it is meticulously researched, and written in a fine and engaging style, combining a handsome biographical sweep with an economic turning of minutiae" - Adrian Paterson, Notes and Queries "The Last Minstrels is quite an accomplished piece of literary history. Schuchard unearths an impressive wealth of information from a wide variety of sources." - Wim Van Mierlo, English "Schuchard's book is a rare thing: a combination of exhaustive, meticulous scholarship... It is impossible to do justice here to the breadth, depth, and sheer erudition of Schuchard's research" - Marjorie Howes, Irish
Literary Supplement "both a monumental work of impeccable scholarship and a compelling narrative" - Marjorie Howes, Irish Literary Supplement "In Ronald Schuchard's sharply focused piece of literary biography and history, Yeats's image gets just the kind of make-over that he himself would have wanted" - English Studies
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Preface
1: Bardic Forefathers
2: London Minstrels
3: Dublin Minstrels
4: Minstrels and Masquers
5: Dancers and Choruses
6: A Spiritual Democracy
7: Minstrel Abroad
8: 'As Regarding Rhythm': Minstrels and Imagists
9: Modern Minstrels
10: The Last Minstrel
Appendix 1: Florence Farr, 'The Chanting of Poems' (1905)
Appendix 2: Florence Farr, 'Music and Words' (1906)
Appendix 3: Edmund Dulac, 'Music and Poetry' (1937)
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The specification in this catalogue, including without limitation price, format, extent, number of illustrations, and month of publication, was as accurate as possible at the time the catalogue was compiled. Occasionally, due to the nature of some contractual restrictions, we are unable to ship a specific product to a particular territory. Jacket images are provisional and liable to change before publication.
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