W. B. Yeats, A Life I: The Apprentice Mage 1865-1914

In the first authorized biography of W. B. Yeats for over 50 years, Roy Foster brings new light to one of the most complex and fascinating lives of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Working from a great archive of personal and contemporary material, he dramatically alters traditional perceptions to illuminate the poet's family history, relationships, politics, and art. From a childhood inheritance of déclassé Irish Protestantism with strong nationalist sympathies, and an exceptional and talented family background, the narrative charts his development into a great poet. It ends in his 50th year with the controversies and disillusionment affecting his personal and public life at the time of the First World War. A bohemian life of uncertain finances, love-affairs, avant-garde friends and experiments with drugs and occultism prefaces his attempt to unite politics with high culture and his creation of an Irish national theatre. Constantly shifting between Dublin, Coole Park and London, with forays to America and Paris, ruthlessly constructing a public life as well as a creative reputation, Yeats's genius attracted admirers and enemies with equal passion. His story intersects with those of an engrossing cast of characters including Lady Gregory, J. M. Synge, George Moore, 'AE', Ezra Pound and above all Maud Gonne - an influence eternally re-created 'like the phoenix', affecting everything he did. The search for supernatural wisdom forms a constant thread, traced through Yeats's occult notebooks and closely related to the insecurities of his personal life. The Apprentice Mage charts the growth of a poet's mind and of an astonishing personality, both of which were instrumental in the formation of a new and radicalised Irish nationalist identity.

Table of Contents:
List of illustrations; Source illustrations; Acknowledgements; Foreword; Family trees; Introduction; Prologue: Yeatses and Pollexfens; 1 The Artist's Children: Sligo 1865-1881; 2 Explorations: Dublin 1881-1887; 3 Two Years: Bedford Park 1887-1889; 4 Secret Societies 1889-1891; 5 The Battles of the Books 1891-1893; 6 Lands of Heart's Desire 1894-1896; 7 Waiting for the Millennium 1896-1898; 8 Shadowy Waters 1898-1900; 9 Occult Politics 1900-1901; 10 National Dramas 1901-1902; 11 The Taste of Salt 1902-1903; 12 From America to Abbey Street 1903-1904; 13 Delighting in Enemies 1905-1906; 14 Synge and the Ireland of His Time 1907-1909; 15 Severances 1909-1910; 16 True and False Irelands 1910-1911; 17 Ghosts 1911-1913; 18 Memory Harbour 1913-1914 Appendix: 'The Poet Yeats Talks Drama with Ashton Stevens', from the San Francisco Examiner, 30 January 1904; Abbreviations; Notes; Index.

About the Author :
R. F. Foster is Carroll Professor of Irish History at Oxford University. Renowned as an Irish historian and biographer, his previous books include Modern Ireland 1600-1972 and The Oxford Illustrated History of Ireland, as well as biographies of Charles Stewart Parnell and Lord Randolph Churchill. Roy Foster was born in Waterford, Ireland, in 1949 and educated in Ireland and in the United States. A graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, where he was a Foundation Scholar in History, he subsequently became Professor of Modern British History at Birkbeck College, University of London, as well as holding visiting fellowships at St Anthony's College, Oxford, the Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton, and Princeton University. In 1991 he became the first Carroll Professor of Irish History at the University of Oxford and was elected a Fellow of Hertford College. He has been a Fellow of the British Academy since 1989.

Review :
`Rich as Foster's achievement was in the first volume, the second volume is more astonishing yet, it is the miracle of this book that it is exhaustive without every being exhausting. The narrative never flags, and the writing never falters. Foster is writing a new kind of history as well as a new kind of biography' Adam Phillips, The Observer `brought an historian's depth to the job' Grey Gowrie, The Daily Telegraph `Its scholarship is meticulous, its story inspiring and its language unfailingly graceful. It is doubtful whether anyone alive knows more about Yeats than Foster, and yet he wears his learning lightly, spinning an epic tale that both the common reader and the specialist can enjoy.' Michael Shelden, The Daily Telegraph `As for the editing of the letters, it is masterly. They're only half of a prodigious undertaking ... The editors' ability to have found out so many lives in the minutest detail is amazing, and the meticulous nature of their scholarship leaves one gasping. What a task! What an achievement! William Butler Yeats, aet. 30-35, here is your early world.' Ronald Blythe, Church Times `a stupendous historiographical feat' Paul Durcan, Irish Sunday Independent `The achievement of Foster's biography can be gauged by the degree to which it holds the conflicting strands and strains of Yeats's life and career in a coherent yet mobile shape, eliciting a Jamesian narrative pattern from the wealth of incidental detail which simplifies neither its subject nor the issues raised ... the book deserves to be welcomed, celebrated and above all read ... Foster's is the only life of Yeats we need, both an impeccable work of scholarship and an extremely well-written narrative in its own right.' Anthony Roche, Irish University Review `he has shown a remarkable power of synthesis and one feels that a picture of the complexities that made up one of Europe's leading literary figures of his time unfolds. It is a work written with a literary polish which does tribute to Yeats and one eagerly awaits the second volume.' Seanchas Ard Mhacha: The Armagh Diocesan Historical Society, Vol 17, no 2, 1998