Poems and Contexts: Yeats Annual No.16: A Special Number

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From this renowned research-level series, Poems and Contexts: Yeats Annual 16 thrusts Yeats's poems back into the circumstances of their creation and revision, thereby addressing what is very much the coming subject in studies of the Irish Literary Revival and the Modernist Movement: the historicity of Yeats's texts. The contexts are geographical and biographical (as in James Pethica's seminal essay '"Upon a House Shaken: The Struggle for Coole Park, 1907-1912'), but also bibliographical, as in Jahan Ramazani's study of The Green Helmet and Other Poems. Other essayists and their themes include Wayne Chapman on Yeats's Rebellion Poems, while Joseph M. Hassett (on the 'Crazy Jane' poems) and P. S. Sri (on the 'Supernatural Songs) address Yeats's poetic sequences from fresh viewpoints. Deirdre Toomey illuminates the turning point of 'The Municipal Gallery Revisited' in Yeats's 'heart-smitten' moment of recognition of Ryllis Broadbent, whom he had met in Shannon's studio 'all but fifty years' before writing the poem. A. Norman Jeffares contributes a major biographical study of Iseult Gonne, and Neil Mann a study of George Yeats and Athanasius Kircher. The biographical theme extends to the research materials which include a full printing of Richard Ellmann's Notebooks on Yeats,and the incipient legends about him as they were told to Ellmann in Dublin and elsewhere in the 1940s. The book reviews include John Harwood's extended reflections on R. F. Foster's W. B. Yeats: A Life: Vol 2: The Arch-Poet. As ever, new images adorn Yeats Annual, the leading research-level journal devoted to the life and work of the greatest poet of the twentieth century.