Nonfiction
Autumn/ September 1966
Ez and Old Billyum
Ezra Pound, after attending the service for T. S. Eliot in Westminster Abbey in January 1965, memorialized an even older association with W. B. Yeats by visiting the poet’s widow […]
Nonfiction
Winter 1964
Yeats without Analogue
When we think of Yeats’s mind in concentration, brooding upon silence, as he said, “like a long-legged fly upon a stream,” we may well hesitate to clatter in armed with […]
Nonfiction
Autumn 1958
The Backgrounds of “The Dead”
Works of art begin before the writers who create them are born; they cling to their childhood and pierce their maturity. To write seems to be unable not to write. […]
Nonfiction
Winter 1957
Wallace Stevens’ Ice-Cream
In contemplating the poetry written by executives of large insurance companies, it is hard not to be curious about their treatment of the great fact of death upon which their […]
Nonfiction
Winter 1956
A Portrait of the Artist as Friend
Revolutionaries fatten on opposition but grow thin and pale when treated with indulgence. Joyce’s ostracism from Dublin lacked, as he was well aware, the moral decisiveness of Dante’s exile from […]
Nonfiction
Summer 1954
The Backgrounds of Ulysses
1. The Artist’s Own Body When the British Broadcasting Company was preparing to present a long program on Joyce, its representatives went to Dublin and approached Dr. Richard Best, sometime […]
Art and "Symbolic"
Summer 1953
The Art of Yeats: Affirmative Capability
I. VARIETIES OF THE IMAGE Goethe remarked, in a phrase that Yeats liked to quote, that the poet must know all philosophy, but keep it out of his work. Yeats’s notion […]
Book Reviews
Summer 1951
The Identity of Yeats
The Collected Poems Of W. B. Yeats. Second Edition. Macmillan. $5.00 At last we have Yeats’s poems in a complete and proof-read edition. The 1933 collection is supplemented by seventy-five […]
Nonfiction
Autumn 1950
Joyce and Yeats
In the Irish literary movement the two leading protagonists, Joyce and Yeats, play complicated roles. Yeats acts the part of founder but, as the movement progresses, seems to be thinking of […]
Nonfiction
Spring 1949
The Ductile Universe of Henri Michaux
Reading Michaux makes one uncomfortable. The world of his poems bears some relation to that of everyday, but it is hard to determine what. If we try to reassure ourselves […]
Nonfiction
Spring 1948
Robartes and Aherne: Two Sides of a Penny
Since Yeats’s death in 1939 he has faded, as he would have wished, into a group of myths. Critics, friends, and biographers have built up a variety of unconnected pictures […]
Younger Poets
Winter 1945
Behind the Lines
She: Leave me, for I hear the guard Approaching on his midnight round. He: Nonsense, for I struck so hard He will not hear another sound. She: Leave me, for I see the […]
Younger Poets
Winter 1945
The Last Man on Earth
By stumbling when they walked, By doubting when they knew, By nodding when they talked As if it all were true, By feigning to be man And being but a […]
Poetry
Spring 1949
In the Land of Magic
You see the cage, you hear fluttering. You note the indisputable noise of the beak sharpening itself against the bars. But no birds at all. In one of these empty […]