“This inexplicable war”. William Butler Yeats and his ‘Silence’ on the Great War
Abstract
On the occasion of W. B. Yeats’s 150th birth anniversary and the First World War centenary, this paper aims at investigating the poet’s response to the tragedy of 1914-1918 by analysing his limited literary output related to the event. While “On Being Asked for a War Poem” is a short manifesto of his detachment, later poems dedicated to his friend Robert Gregory, killed in action, document a closer involvement, but a shifting attitude towards a war entangled with the complex Anglo-Irish question. Yeats’s reticence might also be read as a reaction to the increasing violence of politics, from which, as a public figure with an inclination for peace, he wanted to distance himself.
Bibliografia
Allison, Jonathan. 2006a. War, Passive Suffering and the Poet. The Sewanee Review, 114, 2: 207-219.
Allison, Jonathan. 2006b. Yeats and Politics. Marjorie Howes & John Kelly eds. The Cambridge Companion to W. B. Yeats. Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 185-205.
Brearton, Fran. 2000. The Great War in Irish Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Chapman, W. K. 2006. Joyce and Yeats: Easter 1916 and the Great War. New Hibernia Review 10, 4: 137-151. Center for Irish Studies at the University of St. Thomas.
Foster, Roy. 1988. Modern Ireland, 1600-1972. London: Allen Lane.
Foster, Roy. 2001. Yeats at War: Poetic Strategies and Political Reconstruction from the Easter Rising to the Free State. Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (Sixth Series), 11: 125-145.
Foster, Roy. 2003. W. B. Yeats: A Life, II: The Arch-Poet. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Goldie, David. 2013. Archipelagic Poetry of the First World War. Santanu Das ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Poetry of the First World War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 159-172.
Grayson, Richard S. 2014. Ireland, Ute Daniel, Peter Gatrell, Oliver Janz, Heather Jones, Jennifer Keene, Alan Kramer & Bill Nasson eds. 1914-1918. International Encyclopedia of the First World War. Berlin: Freie Universität Berlin. http://encyclopedia.1914-1918- online.net/article/ireland/2014-10-08 (accessed on 20 November 2015)
Gregory, Lady. 1974. Seventy Years: Being the Autobiography of Lady Gregory. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe.
Horne, John. 2008. Our War: Ireland and the Great War. Dublin: Royal Irish Academy. Hynes, Samuel. 1989. Yeats’s Wars. The Sewanee Review, 97, 1: 36-55.
Jeffery, Keith. 2000. Ireland and the Great War. Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press.
Johnson, Nuala. 2003. Ireland, the Great War and the Geography of Remembrance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kendall, Tim ed. 2013. Poetry of the First World War: An Anthology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kiberd, Declan. 1995. Inventing Ireland: the Literature of the Modern Nation. London: Jonathan Cape.
Kohfeldt, Mary Lou. 1985. Lady Gregory: the Woman Behind the Irish Renaissance. New York: Atheneum.
Leeson, D.M. 2011. The Black & Tans. British Police and Auxiliaries in the Irish War of Independence. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Melchiori, Giorgio. 1979. The Whole Mystery of Art: Pattern Into Poetry in the Work of W. B. Yeats. Westport: Greenwood Press.
Norris, Margot. 2000. Writing War in the Twentieth Century. Charlottesville: University Of Virginia Press.
Owen, Wilfred. 1994. The War Poems. Jon Stallworthy ed. London: Chatto & Windus. Perloff, Marjorie. 2009. ‘Easter, 1916’: Yeats’s First World War Poem. Tim Kendall ed. The Oxford Handbook of British and Irish War Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 227-241.
Ryan, Patrick J. 2014. When a Deeper Need Enters: Politics in the Poetry of Yeats and Heaney. Commonweal Magazine, 141, 13: 21-24.
Stallworthy, John. 1969. W. B. Yeats and Wilfred Owen. Critical Quarterly, 11, 3: 199-216. Thomas, Edward. 2008. The Annotated Collected Poems. Edna Longley ed. Newcastle: Bloodaxe.
Wade, Allen ed. 1954. Letters of W. B. Yeats. London: Rupert Hart-Davis.
Wharton, Edith ed. 1916. The Book of the Homeless. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Williams, Louise Blakeney. 2010. W. B. Yeats in 1914. Michael J. K. Walsh ed. London, Modernism and 1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 20-40.
Yeats, W. B. 1917. The Wild Swans at Coole. Churchtown, Dundrum: The Cuala Press. Yeats, W. B. 1919. The Wild Swans at Coole. New York: The Macmillan Company.
Yeats, W. B. ed. 1936. The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892–1935. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Yeats, W. B. 1997. The Poems. Richard J. Finneran ed. New York: Scribner.