"Explores Seamus Heaney's adaptation of the Celtic ritual known as the Feis of Tara, demonstrates the sovereignty motif's continued relevance in works by Irish poets Thomas Kinsella, John Montague, Eavan Boland, and Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, and refutes criticism that charges sexism and overemphasizes sacrifice in Heaney's poetry"--Provided by publisher.

Examines the life and writings of William Butler Yeats, including a biographical sketch, detailed synopses of his works, social and historical influences, and more.

The fundamental difference between rhetoric and poetry, according to Yeats, is that rhetoric is the expression of ones quarrels with others while poetry is the expression of ones quarrel with oneself. Through exquisite attention to outer and inner forms, Vendler explores the most inventive reaches of the poets mind.

The collected poems of W. B. Yeats. Edited with an Introduction by Piotr Kasjas.

Joseph Keene Chadwick taught at the University of Hawai'i until his untimely death at the age of thirty-seven in 1992. He was a gifted teacher and scholar of Irish literature. He was also an early advocate for gay studies and Pacific literature, and an accomplished translator. In addition to many published essays on these topics, he left an unfinished book manuscript on William Butler Yeats' theory of tragedy. This volume, which includes two chapters from his book on Yeats, presents Chadwick's early interventions into the areas of Irish and gay studies and translation alongside commisioned essays and work by contemporary scholars and writers, including Frank McGuinness, Witi Ihimaera, George Haggerty, and Elizabeth Butler Cullingford.

What are the means available to poetry to address crisis and how can both poets and critics meet the conflicts and challenges they face? This collection of essays addresses poetic and critical responses to the various crises encountered by contemporary writers and our society, from the Holocaust to the ecological crisis.

Our culture attempts to separate competing ideological factions by denying relationships between multiple perspectives and influences outside of one’s own narrow interpretive community. The distinguished essayists in this volume find Daniel R. Schwarz’s pluralistic, self-questioning approach to what he calls “reading texts and reading lives” quite relevant to the current historical moment and political situation. A legendary scholar of modernist literature, Schwarz’s critical principles are a healthy corrective to cultural hubris. The essayists treat works ranging from fictions by Joyce, Conrad, Morrison, and Woolf to the poetry of Yeats, to Holocaust literature, to the environmental writings of Wendell Berry, to the photographs of Lee Friedlander. The authors focus on different works, but they follow Schwarz in stressing formal elements most often associated with traditional realism while keeping an eye on historical and author-centered approaches. The essayists also follow Schwarz in their emphasis on narrative cohesion and in how they look for signs of agency among characters who possess the will to alter their fate, even in a seemingly random universe such as the one depicted by Conrad. Readers with eyes to ethics and aesthetics, they follow Schwarz in encouraging a values-centered approach that leaves room for the reader to address the ways in which reading a text correlates to the reader’s ability to find meaning and value in experience outside the text. Like Schwarz, the essays look for intentionality of authorial meaning (rather than something called an “author function”) as well as for the relationship between lived experience and the imagined world of the literary work (rather than the endless semiotic play of an ultimately indecipherable text).

This volume of twelve essays aims to comprehensively represent the abundance and variety of both Heaney's writing and scholarship on Heaney's writing. Attention is given not only to his poetry but also to his translations and his prose. The essays foreground his internationalism and the complementary international interest in his writing.