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“... ever written polemic quite like that. Still, he meant every word. With the possible exception of Yeats, no modern figure so clearly exemplifies the problem of coming to terms with a writer whose guiding ideas seem so deeply uninteresting. ‘You were silly like us,’ Auden wrote in ‘In Memory of W.B. Yeats’, an ...”

“... such as Parnell and Lord Randolph Churchill (about whom he has already written books) and Yeats (he is writing the authorised biography). Other figures to appear are Trollope and Elizabeth Bowen and Maud Gonne. It is clear that Foster is more interested in posh Protestants than in the members of the Short Strand Martyrs Memorial Flute Band or their ...”

“... By contrast, Lawrence confided enthusiastically to one of his girlfriends that Pound ‘knows W.B. Yeats – all the Swells’, and remarked of Ford’s circle generally: ‘Aren’t the folks kind to me?’ Was it merely class that set these two aspiring artists on courses that were to have such different consequences? In 1909 Ford would certainly have said ...”

“... that my ancestors refused a kingdom which yours subsequently usurped.’ Nine years later, W.B. Yeats had the temerity to leave the author of ‘Two Loves’ out of his Oxford Book of Modern Verse. He received a telegram: ‘Why drag in Oxford? Would not Shoneen Irish be a more correct description?’ In 1936, now well into his sixties, Douglas wrote ...”

“... in the Lancet in 1897 (it’s likely that he also administered the substance to his friends W.B. Yeats and Arthur Symons), instead tended to focus on its visual effects. Ellis described ‘the brilliance, delicacy and variety of the colours’ and ‘their lovely and various textures’. Peyote reached Europe in tandem with the X-ray, cinema and electric ...”

“... arrows of Dotty’s egotism’. The couple formed a joint friendship with the elderly W.B. Yeats, a connection about which her biographers could surely have said more. In 1938, with war looming, Matheson was again recruited for espionage. She organised talks for MI6’s Joint Broadcasting Committee with her colleague Guy Burgess, who had been at the ...”

“... for a universal theory of religion, not the racial essence of their folk. In a review of W.B. Yeats he remarked that there was nothing unique about the beings lurking in the Celtic Twilight: ‘The great Celtic phantasmagoria is the world’s phantasmagoria.’ Sloan evokes the guilt that shrouded Lang’s interest in the primitive vestiges of the British ...”

“... Golden Dawn with occasional compliments to past ravers like Walt Whitman, Omar Khayyam and W.B. Yeats. Mercifully, the words give way at last to music of the heart, the nostalgic splendour which has made Morrison into a sui generis world figure. ‘Hyndford Street, Abetta Parade. Orangefield, St Donard’s Church’: this is the nation from before the world ...”

“... pay a Venetian printer to produce 150 copies of A Lume Spento, one of which he dispatched to W.B. Yeats. Yeats courteously replied that he found the book ‘charming’. A more public acclamation of his talent came from the popular ‘poetess’ – as the review’s headline describes her – Ella Wheeler Wilcox, a family ...”

“... are passed on. His own father is a ‘deep thinker’, who has seen a bit of the world and quotes Yeats, while his mother, played by Judi Dench (with an erratic Belfast accent), is enduringly supportive. Contact with the old folks helps stabilise Buddy’s household despite money worries and the strain of Pa working away. Domestic tensions are compounded by ...”

“... to the dogs. But the staged apocalypse feels serendipitous, chancy, thrilling.Hardy, Eliot and Yeats loomed large in Auden’s pantheon, but he wasn’t about to be co-opted into anyone else’s story of tradition and the individual talent. He had a penchant for anagrams, and was pleased to know himself as someone who might ‘hug a wet shady nun’ (the ...”

“... did Joyce hesitate to contact major figures in the literary world: Ibsen, George Russell, W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory among others. But even as he made these contacts the young man courted rejection; a long letter to Ibsen on his 73rd birthday closes with the idea that the great playwright had ‘only opened the way’ and that ‘higher and holier ...”

“... glaze of beauty and fastidiousness had been applied to vulgar clay’. Two years earlier, W.B. Yeats had published In the Seven Woods, which was full of references to fashions changing and a woman ageing; it had ‘Adam’s Curse’ as its centrepiece, in which the ‘beautiful mild woman’, on hearing the poet outline the difficulty of creating ...”

“... detect analogies, often defined as prolepses, between 18th-century and later writers. Flaubert and Yeats are frequent presences, and Mailer turns up in the index four times. Rawson’s past is definitely prologue. In a writer so self-consciously uppish, so concerned with tonalities, so in love with the demotic, and so free-ranging in his ...”

“... In May 1895, the day before Oscar Wilde’s trial began, W.B. Yeats called at Wilde’s mother’s house in London to express his solidarity and that of ‘some of our Dublin literary men’ with the family. He later wrote of ‘the Britisher’s jealousy of art and artists, which is generally dormant but called into activity when the artist has gone outside his field into publicity of an undesirable kind ...”