Yeats's Political Identities: Selected Essays

There are as many versions of W. B. Yeats as there are readers of his work: he is the poet of totalitarian force for some, the cultural nationalist and agent of decolonization for others; he is the elegist of the Anglo-Irish, yet also the witness of transcendental vision. In Yeats's Political Identities Jonathan Allison collects some of the most trenchant essays of the last three decades on what Yeats's politics were and how important they are for reading his work.
The volume's fifteen essays on Yeats--some original, some previously published--are culled from sources on both sides of the Atlantic. Opening with an introductory reflection on the poet's reception, Allison then turns to Conor Cruise O'Brien's influential 1965 article on Yeats's authoritarian leanings. The essays that follow cover a wide range of related topics, including Yeats's relationships to fascism, nationalism, colonialism, and the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy. The closing section of the book comprises a group of essays that respond to earlier meditations on the political resonance of the poet's work. Finally, an annotated bibliography provides brief commentary on other work on the politics of Yeats's writing.
The title of the collection speaks to the complexity of this important figure, and warns against adopting too simplistic a view of his career and significance. It hopes to suggest the diversity of critical opinion on Yeats's politics currently in circulation, as well as the divergent political identities the poet embraced during his lifetime. Inevitably with such an anthology, many of these essays speak to each other, or argue against each other, across theoretical, political, and intellectual divides.
Contributors include Hazard Adams, George Bornstein, Ronald Bush, Elizabeth Cullingford, Seamus Deane, Roy Foster, Maurice Harmon, Seamus Heaney, Marjorie Howes, Richard Kearney, Declan Kiberd, David Krause, David Lloyd, Edna Longley, and Augustine Martin.
This book will have particular appeal for students of Yeats and his world, but it will also interest students of Irish literature, history, and culture and of modernism more generally. Those who study the aesthetics of reception and the relationship between literature and politics will also find it useful.
Jonathan Allison is Associate Professor of English, University of Kentucky.