Imagining Ireland

"An important part of the Irish national imaginary, Yeat's poems and plays have helped to invent the nation of Ireland, while critiquing the modern Irish state that emerged from the nation's revolutionary period. This study offers a chronological account of Yeat's volumes of poetry, contextualizing and analyzing them in light of Irish cultural and political history."--

"This book offers a lucid and comprehensive account of Yeats's poems, volume by volume, in the context of Ireland's period of decolonization, from the late nineteenth century through the 1930s. The connections between Yeats's writing and politics are explored in the light of contemporary theories of nationalism and modernism. Yeats imagined revolutionary Ireland in both Romantic and Modernist modes, as a nation struggling to come into being, and as the center of apocalyptic fragmentation. His mastery and extension of the traditional forms of verse, from ballad and sonnet to modernist sequence or constellation, gives aesthetic shape to the preoccupations of nation and cultural crisis. This well-written analysis of Yeats's poetry and drama also introduces readers to the major scholarship on Yeats"--