“... bafflement or anger of hard-line physical-force men like O’Donovan Rossa or John O’Leary. W.B. Yeats consigned Romantic Ireland to the grave with O’Leary: Davitt discovered its terminal weakness much earlier. He outgrew the Fenian romanticism of his youth – in Moody’s words, ‘the practical revolutionist in Davitt was disgusted even more by the gory ...”

“... of Bloomsbury, and found English intellectuals very polite. (They would listen patiently to W.B. Yeats, he wrote to his wife, even while he was ‘comparing their national character unfavourably with that of cannibals, Hindus and Japanese, and God knows what’.) Nevertheless, he was drifting, and even contemplated an inglorious return to South Africa. It ...”

“... and literary. The Modernist who most vividly imagined himself in need of a good surgeon was W.B. Yeats: ‘Yeats constantly sought to renew himself in later life, to overcome his feelings of age and to undergo a rebirth.’ In Romantic fashion, he had always associated self-renewal with a renewal of creative impulse. But ...”

“... prompt for the biography was an anecdote. Ellmann was working on his first book, a study of W.B. Yeats, and became fascinated by the story of the 20-year-old Joyce calling on the poet, seventeen years his elder, with the kindly intention of explaining where Yeats was going wrong as a writer. ‘How old are you?’ Joyce ...”

“... photograph by Annan – ‘loose collar and a tie gathered in a big, mock-careless bow, like W.B. Yeats’ – says it all. He also had airs, and it cannot have helped when he and his half-English middle-class wife moved to that introverted, artistic house in the West End. Most of Mackintosh’s buildings survived, but it was outside opinion that was largely ...”

“... founder of the Gaelic League, receives two sentences. The contributions of Alice Milligan, W.B. Yeats, Lady Gregory and Constance Markievicz are ignored, presumably because they too were Protestants. So are the contributions of other revivalists, such as James Joyce, a Catholic nationalist who loathed the Church because of its condemnation of the ...”

“... who regard themselves as too important to undergo anything as squalid as personal extinction. W.B. Yeats may not have landed among that select company, but the hair-raisingly blasphemous epitaph he wrote for himself – Cast a cold eye On life, on death. Horseman, pass by! – disdains death as a vulgarity fit only for clerks and shopkeepers. It is the ...”

“... to a generally post-Hegelian consciousness, Buthlay indicates more specific analogies with Yeats’s use of self and anti-self. Previous critics have often taken too narrow a view of Gregory Smith’s emphasis on the tendency to combine opposites as a characteristic of distinctively Scottish writing. Buthlay is right to emphasise that this view of ...”

“... of poetry, which involved bestowing a gold medal on Thomas Hardy in partnership with W.B. Yeats, a supremely embarrassing occasion – all the honours which a literary man with the right attitudes (Edmund Gosse was such another) might expect to receive in those days. Newbolt’s private life remained uncriticised, and on the whole did him ...”

“... hills; Hardy too, haunting his Wessex ways, A pastoral order dying in his gaze, and William Yeats – a ‘stubborn and age-angry man’ – who laughed ‘with rod and can’. Hall attributes vain powers by falsely calling these poets ‘lords/ Of a landscape’; this sort of tribute does neither living nor dead any good. ‘Alfoxton’ glamorises the ...”

“... family. Ida’s father, John Trivett, was a painter of some repute, though remembered by W.B. Yeats chiefly for his ‘melodramatic lions’; her mother, Adaline, was a dressmaker and theatrical costumier. She created the famous iridescent gown, covered in beetle wings, in which Ellen Terry played Lady Macbeth and in which Sargent painted her in 1889. The ...”

“... Living next to Basil Blackwell’s bookshop in Oxford, in the best of psychic health, was W.B. Yeats, whose latest volume ... There’s scholarship for you! Antony Alpers has a nice sense of irony, and a sense of adventure too. He sometimes begins a sentence dramatically only to have it snatched from him by the sabbatical professor from Ontario: ‘This ...”

“... As the tragedy ends, the drumming hoofbeats resume. Purgatory is one of the boldest works of Yeats’s turbulent old age. Its reassertion, in the Old Man’s speeches, of the glories of the Protestant Ascendancy, and its unorthodox view of the afterlife, were an affront to newly independent Catholic Ireland, and its brutal subject-matter still has the ...”

“... kind chauffeur?’ he continued. ‘Platt,’ I said. ‘Avies Platt. And may I ask yours?’ ‘Yeats,’ he said! ‘W.B. Yeats.’ And added: ‘I’m a poet.’ If he had said his name was Michael and declared himself to be an archangel it could not have had a more catastrophic effect upon me. ‘What?’ I ...”

“... and Henry Miller, Robert Graves and Laura Riding, Nadezhda and Osip Mandelstam, W.B. and Georgie Yeats all get chapters to themselves. Since some of her cases come close to the pathological, and most are ineffably silly, there is nothing instructive about reading or writing here: only the posturings of people trying to live up to a fantasy of the writer’s ...”