Yeats: The Man and the Masks
10 best books like Yeats: The Man and the Masks (Richard Ellmann): Freud: A Life for Our Time, Shelley: The Pursuit, T.S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life, 1,000 Years of Irish Poetry, Selected Poems and Three Plays, Lives of the Poets, The Pound Era, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, The Redress of Poetry, The Dyer's Hand
| Author | Peter Gay |
| ISBN | 0393328619 |
Brilliant biography of Freud (probably the best since Ernest Jones’s three v. effort). Heavy emphasis on ideas, especially within the nineteenth century context (both bourgeois Vienna & 19th c. scientific -- e.g., Darwin & physiological school). Treats the psychoanalytic movement,...
| Author | Richard Holmes |
| ISBN | 1590170377 |
Shelley: The Pursuit is the book with which Richard Holmes—the finest literary biographer of our day—made his name. Dispensing with the long-established Victorian picture of Shelley as a blandly ethereal character, Holmes projects a startling image of "a darker and more earthly, crueler and...
| Author | Lyndall Gordon |
| ISBN | 0393320936 |
In this "nuanced, discerning account of a life famously flawed in its search for perfection" (The New Yorker), Gordon captures Eliot's "complex spiritual and artistic history . . . with tact, diligence, and subtlety" (Boston Globe). Drawing on recently discovered letters, she addresses in full...
| Author | Kathleen Hoagland |
| ISBN | 1568522355 |
This is a very long anthology that tries very hard to be comprehensive. As a resource for those interested in the history of Irish poetry it is quite useful (the subtitle is "The Gaelic and Anglo-Irish Poets from Pagan Times to the Present"). For scholars it has less utility as it is rather short on annotations...
| Author | W.B. Yeats |
| ISBN | 0020715609 |
My favorite poems are as follows:
The Lake of Innisfree
When you are Old
The Second Coming
On Woman
The People
However, my favorite lines came for "The Death of Cuchulain" (1939)
When they told me that I could have my own way I wrote certain guiding principles...and...
| Author | Michael Schmidt |
| ISBN | 0375706046 |
National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist
In this stunning volume of epic breadth, Michael Schmidt connects the lives and works of more than 300 poets over the last 700 years--spanning distant shores from Scotland to Australia to the Caribbean, all sharing the English language.
Schmidt...
| Author | Hugh Kenner |
| ISBN | 0520024273 |
"Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era could as well be known as the Kenner era, for there is no critic who has more firmly established his claim to valuable literary property than has Kenner to the first three decades of the 20th century in England. Author of pervious studies of Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis...
| Author | Ezra Pound |
| ISBN | 0811201570 |
This collection of essays, edited by Pound's friend and fellow poet T.S. Eliot, contains essays from five earlier volumes: Pavannes and Divisions (1918), Instigations(1920), How to Read(1931), Make it New(1934), and Polite Essays(1937). The thirty-three essays contained in this collection...
| Author | Seamus Heaney |
| ISBN | 0374248532 |
This might seem an odd choice: a collection of lectures about poetry, some of them to an Oxford audience. Sounds stuffy as can be - but it isn't. Wherever they were first heard, each lecture was written to be understood by anyone, and send them back to the works they cover.
The best piece, and perhaps...
| Author | W.H. Auden |
| ISBN | 0679724842 |
In this volume, W. H. Auden assembled, edited, and arranged the best of his prose writing, including the famous lectures he delivered as Oxford Professor of Poetry. The result is less a formal collection of essays than an extended and linked series of observations—on poetry, art, and the observation...
| Author | Edmund Wilson |
| ISBN | 0374529272 |
Published in 1931, Axel's Castle was Edmund Wilson's first book of literary criticism--a landmark book that explores the evolution of the French Symbolist movement and considers its influence on six major twentieth-century writers: William Butler Yeats, Paul Valéry, T. S. Eliot, Marcel Proust,...
Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett
| Author | James Knowlson |
| ISBN | 0802141250 |
Damned to Fame is the brilliant and insightful portrait of Nobel Prize-winning author Samuel Beckett, mysterious and reclusive master of twentieth-century literature. Professor James Knowlson, Beckett's chosen biographer and a leading authority on Beckett, vividly recreates Beckett's life...
| Author | Malcolm Bradbury |
| ISBN | 0140138323 |
History
Any reader of literary fiction from the last 120 years will sooner or later encounter the distinction between Modernism and Post-Modernism.
My teenage years coincided with the 1970's. During this period I became a consumer and advocate of Modernism, whether or not I could...
| Author | Edna O'Brien |
| ISBN | 2762123216 |
Although Edna O'Brien has never trafficked in James Joyce's head-over-heels brand of high modernism, she does have a couple of characteristics in common with her great predecessor. After all, both authors engaged in a profoundly ambivalent excoriation of their native Ireland. And while O'Brien's...
| Author | Justin Kaplan |
| ISBN | 0060535113 |
“Whitman emerges from this biography alive and kicking—hugely human, enormously attractive.” —Newsweek
A moving, penetrating, sharply focused portrait of America’s greatest poet—his genius, his passions, his androgynous sensibility—an exuberant life entwined...
| Author | David Riggs |
| ISBN | 0805080368 |
"Riggs brings it all together brilliantly, assembling all evidence of Marlowe's life and adding to that a wider and deeper focus . . . Superb."--Los Angeles Times
The World of Christopher Marlowe is the story of the troubled genius, raised in the stench and poverty of Canterbury's abbatoirs,...
| Author | Leslie A. Fiedler |
| ISBN | 1564781631 |
A retrospective article on Leslie Fiedler in the New York Times Book Review in 1965 referred to Love and Death in the American Novel as “one of the great, essential books on the American imagination . . . an accepted major work.” This groundbreaking work views in depth both American literature and...
| Author | Declan Kiberd |
| ISBN | 0674463641 |
Just as Ireland has produced many brilliant writers in the past century, so these writers have produced a new Ireland. In a book unprecedented in its scope and approach, Declan Kiberd offers a vivid account of the personalities and texts, English and Irish alike, that reinvented the country after centuries...
A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms
| Author | Richard A. Lanham |
| ISBN | 0520076699 |
The first edition of this widely used work has been reprinted many times over two decades. With a unique combination of alphabetical and descriptive lists, it provides in one convenient, accessible volume all the rhetorical terms—mostly Greek and Latin—that students of Western literature...
Nora: A Biography of Nora Joyce
Nora was twenty years old and penniless when she eloped from Ireland with Joyce, a man of brilliant promise but few accomplishments whom she'd known but three months. She remained with him until his death thirty-seven years later, bearing him two children, governing a succession of unruly households...
All Will Be Well: A Memoir
| Author | John McGahern |
| ISBN | 1400044960 |
From award-winning author John McGahern, a memoir of his childhood in the Irish countryside and the beginnings of his life as a writer.McGahern describes his early years as one of seven children growing up in rural County Leitrim, a childhood was marked by his father’s violent nature and the early...
| Author | J.M. Synge |
| ISBN | 0140184325 |
In 1907 J. M. Synge achieved both notoriety and lasting fame with The Playboy of the Western World. The Aran Islands, published in the same year, records his visits to the islands in 1898-1901, when he was gathering the folklore and anecdotes out of which he forged The Playboy and his other major dramas.
Yet...
| Author | Harry Blamires |
| ISBN | 0415138582 |
Since 1966 readers new to James Joyce have depended upon this essential guide to Ulysses. Harry Blamires helps readers to negotiate their way through this formidable, remarkable novel and gain an understanding of it which, without help, it might have take several readings to achieve. The New Bloomsday...
