Making the Void Fruitful : Yeats As Spiritual Seeker and Petrarchan Lover.
- 1st ed.
- 1 online resource (272 pages)
Intro -- Contents -- Abbreviations -- Acknowledgments -- Part One - W. B. Yeats as Spiritual Seeker -- General Prologue: The Thinking of the Body -- 1. Introduction: Bodily Decrepitude and the Imagination -- 2. Hermeticism, Theosophy, Gnosticism -- 3. The Seeker -- 4. The Byzantium Poems and Apocalypse in 'The Secret Rose' and 'The Second Coming' -- 5. Gnosis and Self-Redemption -- 6. Sex, Philosophy, and the Occult -- 7. Mountain Visions and Other Last Things -- Part Two - Love's Labyrinth: Yeats as Petrarchan Poet (The Maud Gonne Poems) -- Preface to Part Two -- 8. Poet and Muse -- 9. Maud Gonne, and Yeats as Petrarchan Lover -- 10: The Poems: A Sampling -- 11. Rose, Wind, and the Seven Woods -- 12. Maud as Helen: The Green Helmet Poems -- 13. Responsibilities and The Wild Swans at Coole -- 14. 'A Bronze Head' and Beyond -- 15. Thought Distracted: 'Man and the Echo,' 'Politics,' and Conclusion -- Eulogy: Harold Bloom (1930-2019) -- Select Bibliography -- Index.
Shedding fresh light on the life and work of William Butler Yeats--widely acclaimed as the major English-language poet of the twentieth century--this new study by leading scholar Patrick J. Keane questions established understandings of the Irish poet's long fascination with the occult: a fixation that repelled literary contemporaries T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden, but which enhanced Yeats's vision of life and death.