Tag: William Butler Yeats
Irish playwright Seán O’Casey called him “the jesting poet with a radiant star in his coxcomb.” Eugene O’Neill asked him to name his children. James Joyce asked him to complete ‘Finnegans Wake’ should Joyce himself go blind. He published plays, novels, stories, and poems, including a series of them in The New Yorker in 1929, … Read More
And yet what needs there here Excuse,
Where ev’ry Thing does answer Use?
Andrew Marvell wrote those lines long before anyone dreamed of the United States of America, but he could be asking the question of poetry itself in a land like America, where creative writers can be as careerist as bankers. Even … Read More
Good, empathic, sensitive, wise and true Walter Pater, secular prophet to a generation of modernists.
Pater’s aesthetics favor the neo-classicism and “Greek sensuousness” of the Renaissance, which he says “does not fever the conscience” in the way that medieval “Christian asceticism” does. He abjured the latter philosophy as one which discredits “the slightest touch of sense.” … Read More
Somewhere, in the last ten or twenty years or so, Dale Peck wrote that the development of the novel in English took a wrong turn somewhere in the middle of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. His attack was really on post-modernism, and all literature that appears complex and self-referential … Read More