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Yeats and Violence
Michael Wood
272 pages
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196x129mm
978-0-19-955766-0
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Hardback
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24 June 2010
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- A masterclass in close reading
- Engages with long-standing debates about Irish history and culture
- Situates 'Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen' within Yeats's broader poetic practice
The night can sweat with terror as before
We pieced our thoughts into philosophy,
And planned to bring the world under a rule,
Who are but weasels fighting in a hole.
W.B. Yeats, 'Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen'
This is a book about how poetry, seen through the instance of a single poem, seeks to make sense of a turbulent and dangerous world. Poetry must introduce order and shape where there is none, and also, in certain crucial cases, remain faithful to the disorder and shapelessness of experience. Many poems manage the first of these tasks; very few manage both. W.B.
Yeats 'Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen' (written and first published in 1921) is one of them. It is a work which asks what happens when what is taken to be civilization crumbles. What apocalyptic events wait in the wings? What are history's victims (and executors) to do except mock and mourn?
Successive chapters investigate the six parts of the poem, connecting them to Yeats' broader poetic practice, his interest in the occult and his changing vision of Irish nationalism; to the work of other poets (Irish, English, Russian German); and to Irish and European history between 1916 (the date of the Easter Uprising in Dublin) and 1923 (the date of the end of the Irish Civil War). Theoretical considerations of the shape and meaning of violence, both political and
religious, link the chapters to each other.Readership: Students and scholars of modern literature and poetry
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Michael Wood, Charles Barnwell Straut Professor of English and Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University
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"In all, it is a worthy classroom text for opening up discussion, for beginning Yeatss work, providing contexts for analysis, and enabling a community of interpretation. Lively and lucid, it moves along at a steady pace and sustains interest for the most part despite the aforementioned moments of over-labour. In all, this is a wide-ranging, sometimes eccentric, but irrefutably passionate, penetrating, and personal tribute from one reader to a poem and a poet that we will never exhaust." - Maria Johnston, Years Work in English Studies "Truly exhilarating" - Times Literary Supplement, Paul Muldoon's Book of The Year 3/12/2010 "Wood commits himself to detailed reading and careful interpretation of poetry;
and the more of this he engages in, the less Yeats seems a mere literary manifestation of theoretical models of "violence"." - Peter McDonald, Times Literary Supplement "the reader is immersed in a range of lively arguments" - New Yorker "Wood's criticism is exuberantly characterful, adventurous in its scholarship, and greedily, giddily speculative" - Leo Robson, New Statesman
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Introduction: Up Close and Serial
1: Violent Men
2: The Platonic Year
3: The Temptation of Form
4: The Old Country
5: Violence upon the Roads
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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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