| ||||||||||||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £0.25
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in Yeats, the Man and the Masks for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £0.25, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
The most influential poet of his age, Yeats eluded the grasp of many who sought to explain him. In this classic critical examination of the poet, Richard Ellmann strips away the masks of his subject: occultist, senator of the Irish Free State, libidinous old man, and Nobel Prize winner.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
First Sentence
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS, since his death just before the recent war, has come to be ranked by many critics as the dominant poet of our time. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS, since his death just before the recent war, has come to be ranked by many critics as the dominant poet of our time. Read the first page
Explore More
Concordance
Browse Sample PagesConcordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Published first in 1948, and revised in 1978, this book remains THE definitive one-volume survey of Yeats, seemlessly blending literary criticism with biography in an elegant way.
Ellmann provides a thorough sketch of Yeats's life, giving a clear account of all the great man's political activities, romantic entanglements and occult fascinations. When it comes to the literary work, Ellmann writes with characteristic authority. He sheds new light on poems you thought you knew well, and succeeds in bringing to vivid life other poems that had completely passed you by, or that had just as likely gone right over your head.
I would recommend this book to anyone interested in Yeats and his work, especially A Level students and undergraduates who are desperate to clarify exactly what drives Yeats and who require a clear, accessible way into the poems.
No-one does literary biography better than Ellmann, and writers of his kind are far too rare these days. Not only is this book superbly written, but it's frank about Yeats's personal and public life without being prurient or patronising, while the comments on the literary works are pithy and convincing.
Having read Ellmann's primer again, I am now ready to get into Roy Foster's more recent (and far more substantial) two volume Life of Yeats. Needless to say, I've already re-immersed myself in the actual poems.
Ellmann provides a thorough sketch of Yeats's life, giving a clear account of all the great man's political activities, romantic entanglements and occult fascinations. When it comes to the literary work, Ellmann writes with characteristic authority. He sheds new light on poems you thought you knew well, and succeeds in bringing to vivid life other poems that had completely passed you by, or that had just as likely gone right over your head.
I would recommend this book to anyone interested in Yeats and his work, especially A Level students and undergraduates who are desperate to clarify exactly what drives Yeats and who require a clear, accessible way into the poems.
No-one does literary biography better than Ellmann, and writers of his kind are far too rare these days. Not only is this book superbly written, but it's frank about Yeats's personal and public life without being prurient or patronising, while the comments on the literary works are pithy and convincing.
Having read Ellmann's primer again, I am now ready to get into Roy Foster's more recent (and far more substantial) two volume Life of Yeats. Needless to say, I've already re-immersed myself in the actual poems.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
5 reviews
35 of 35 people found the following review helpful
Casting a Cold Eye
6 Jun 2000
Format:Paperback
THE definitive, open, and engaging study of the man T.S.Eliot declared the greatest poet of his age. Richard Ellman is no longer with us, but this is a monument of Yeats biography and criticism, the book which all subsequent biographers try to rewrite. The text itself, written as it was amidst a flurry of uncollected papers in the forties and with the co-operation of W.B.'s widow George, is understandably reticent about some elements of the poet's private life, notably his early lovers and extra-marital affairs; but the introduction printed with this new edition fills in many of the blanks, and gives the reasoning for Ellman's assertion that Yeats's affair with Maud Gonne was indeed finally consummated, confirming a suspicion hitherto based only on ambiguous references in letters and the poem 'A Man Young and Old'. Most of all, however, it is Ellman's sensitive and insightful treatment of Yeats's at once shy and self-possessed nature that impresses; the writer will never have a more accurate critic, and the man never a more sincere and biting appraisal of his contradictions. This is the place to start if you are interested in Yeats: you may not find the book or the man that you were expecting, an easy dreamy life of lost women and lake isles, but the portrait is truer, and the artistic genius more clearly delineated than in any other book on the subject, and there have been many. Ellman went on to write the definitive lives of James Joyce and Oscar Wilde; that his first essay in literary biography stands comparison with these is its own testament.
28 of 28 people found the following review helpful
Biograph Master
11 April 2003
Format:Paperback
Ellmann was only 30 when he published this in 1948, less than 10 years after Yeats's death; he was the first biographer to see Yeats's papers in their chaotic entirety. What an astounding job! You'd think this would read like a warm-up for his later magisterial biographies of Joyce and Wilde, but "The Man and the Masks" holds its own against those works, giving a sensitive, economical portrait of an unusually fractured poet.
Ellmann stresses Yeats's life-long effort to forge his thoughts into a unified system in the teeth of inbred skepticism, shyness and vacillation. He draws a discreet curtain over the sexual parts of Yeats's life but compensates with a keen understanding of the courage it took for this diffident, ill-read & dreamy man to make himself by fits and starts into a modern poet. My favorite parts of the book were the sections where Ellmann compares earlier drafts of the poems to the printed versions, showing just how hard-won Yeats's genius was. He tempers a critical eye towards Yeats's excesses--the wild mysticism, the Fascist sympathies, the arrogant public demeanor--with an understanding of Yeats's deep need for masks. According to Ellmann, Yeats's theories and systems weren't dogmas so much as postures he assumed to fulfill his own desire for a certainty of belief he never quite attained. Ellmann shows how that drive shaped the poems and ultimately rescued them from the deadness certitude would have brought. A classic study and an excellent starting-point for further reading on Yeats's life and work.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Biography and Literary criticism as one
17 Jan 2006
Format:Hardcover
Ellmann was both a masterful biographer and first- rate literary critic. In this early book he writes an excellent account of the life of Yeats, and combines with an overall analysis of Yeats' literary development. He probes deeply into the symbolic and mythic meaning of Yeats' poetry and provides for the lay-reader a key to this often complex poetry's, understanding.
Ellmann would go on later to write his much larger masterpiece , the biography of Joyce- but here as a young man he shows a surprising depth of understanding of the full range of Yeats' problems through his remarkable creative, and not easy personal, life.
Ellmann would go on later to write his much larger masterpiece , the biography of Joyce- but here as a young man he shows a surprising depth of understanding of the full range of Yeats' problems through his remarkable creative, and not easy personal, life.
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
|
|
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
