“... Watts and Thomas Hardy as at least as interesting as the wildness of Christopher Smart and W.B. Yeats. I’m not sure how moderate Hardy was – an amiable re-opening of this question was the subject of the postcard from Stanford – but Watts does sound like the unanxious Calvinist, the man who has made his peace with the abandonment of extravagance. In ...”

“... Are we to think that the good grey Reverend Mr Thomas is as much of an arrogant élitist as W.B. Yeats? Why yes, we are: the note is intermittent but consistent throughout Thomas’s poetry, and it does him credit. For the temptation for a Welshman is to blame the ‘plastic and trash’, or in another poem the ‘Corona and potato crisps’, upon the ...”

“... one point we catch the author of Ascendancy and Tradition considering the way in which Joyce and Yeats ‘as a binary and mutually dependent cultural production confront the totality of history’. There the two unfortunate literary figures stand, symbiosis thrust upon them. At another moment, the history of Ireland is called ‘bifurcated’, which makes it ...”

“... An Historical Comedy which had delightful illustrations by Davenport of Buster Keaton, W.B. Yeats, Abraham Cowley, a ‘Franco-Cantabrian Muralist’, Andy Warhol and Charles Babbage, among others. Davenport published his first book of short fiction (or ‘assemblages’ as he called it), Tatlin! Six Stories, as well as translations of the fragments of ...”

“... is why, from the heretical medieval philosopher John Scottus Eriugena to Bishop Berkeley and W.B. Yeats, there is such a robust Irish faith in the imagination’s power to summon new worlds into existence. Philosophically, this suspicion of realism went hand in hand with a rejection of rationalism and materialism. If there is such an entity as the Irish ...”

“... and pamphlets from Indian takeaways. Within a couple of paragraphs in Injury Time, he moves from Yeats to David Beckham to Dame Gillian Beer – consummations devoutly to be desired. He is consistently pleasantly unpredictable, in the way that, say, E.B. White was consistently pleasantly unpredictable, or perhaps Alastair Cooke delivering his weekly Letter ...”

“... doctrine, they flourish robustly in that soil. It is not surprising, then, that Eliot, like W.B. Yeats, should at times be found looking on Fascism with qualified approval, or that he should have made some deplorably anti-semitic comments. The problem with all such political strictures, however, is that conservatives do not regard their beliefs as ...”

“... F.S.L. Lyons, who first undertook this large-scale biography of Yeats, died in 1983, and after some vicissitudes the task devolved on Roy Foster, the professor of Irish history at Oxford. He has had access to Lyons’s notes and transcripts, invaluable to a successor confronted, as he says, with ‘a vast and unfamiliar subject ...”

“... the young Cecil B. DeMille and camped out with him in Maine, meanwhile corresponding with W.B. Yeats. He knew both Henry James and Tennessee Williams, patronised Masefield and Ezra Pound. Mark Twain wrote a poem about him ... Altogether, Witter Bynner seems too large a person to be discussed merely as an appendage of D.H. Lawrence. This collection of ...”

“... must involve fate or providence, which may in turn require the presence of numinous powers. W.B. Yeats could see nothing tragic about a car crash. Pure contingency – falling drunkenly from a fifth-floor window, for example – lacks the grandeur of the tragic. The protagonist must be of high social rank, partly because the lives of ordinary people aren’t ...”

“... indeed hardly left England – his translations from Persian and other languages depended on the web of contacts the empire established, and thrived on the knowledge gained from its commercial and political ambitions. As Edward Said pointed out, such interests directed scholarship, however detached the scholars themselves seemed from the profits of ...”

“... Moore was not (or not merely) a crackpot and a pervert, but the friend and collaborator of W.B. Yeats and a leading figure in the Irish literary renaissance.’ It is the ‘not merely’ that rescues Carey’s puritanism from the easy piety which sometimes seems to threaten it, but there is a steeliness there too, perhaps even a mild relish. At moments ...”

“... most noteworthy appearance in Irish letters until now came in one of the last poems of W.B. Yeats. In the spring of 1938 the poet read a piece in the Yale Review by Archibald MacLeish, the only article on his work ‘which has not bored me for years’ – a disarming piece of Yeatsian egotism since most of the article was not about him. True, he made a ...”

“... for Irish Independence, the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) leader, John O’Leary who, in Yeats’s poem, shared his grave with the corpse of ‘romantic Ireland’, observing that the Brotherhood’s ‘propagandist work was … entirely separatist with practically no reference to Republicanism’. Similarly, and just as surprisingly, Townshend ...”

“... In 1918, the intensity of Yeats’s fascination with the young American phenomenon Ezra Pound had cooled enough for Jack Butler Yeats to supply his son with some smouldering paternal wisdom: The poets loved of Ezra Pound are tired of Beauty, since they have met it so often ... I am tired of Beauty my wife, says the poet, but here is that enchanting mistress Ugliness ...”