Yeats as Precursor

Readings in Irish, British and American Poetry

S. Matthews

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2000
• ISBN:
  9780230599482
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

As both a late Romantic and a modern, W.B. Yeats has proved to be perhaps the most influential poet of the early twentieth-century. In this original study Steven Matthews traces, through close readings of significant poems, the flow of Yeatsian influence across time and cultural space. By engaging with the formalist criticism of Harold Bloom and Paul de Man in their dialogues with Jacques Derrida, he also considers Yeats's significance as the founding presence within the major poetry criticism of the century.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1. Yeats: Influence, Tradition and the Problematics of Reading
• 2. ‘The Terror of his Vision’: Yeats and Irish Poetry
• 3. Inevitable Abstractions: Yeats and British Poetry
• 4. Possession and Dispossession: Yeats and American Poetry
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index