About the Book
The acclaimed first volume of this definitive biography of W. B. Yeats left him in his fiftieth year, at a cross-roads in his life. The subsequent quarter-century surveyed in The Arch-Poet takes in his rediscovery of advanced nationalism and his struggle for an independent Irish culture, his continued pursuit of supernatural truths through occult experimentation, his extraordinary marriage, and a series of tumultuous love affairs. Throughout he was writing
his greatest poems, from the stark simplicity of 'The Fisherman' and 'The Wild Swans at Coole', through the magnificent complexities of the sequences reflecting the Troubles and Civil War and the Byzantium
poems, to the radical compression of his last work - some of it literally written on his deathbed. The drama of his life is mapped against the history of the Irish revolution and the new Irish state founded in 1922. Yeats's many political roles and his controversial involvement in a right-wing movement during the early 1930s are covered more closely than ever before, and his complex and passionate relationship with the developing history of his country remains a central
theme. Throughout this book, the genesis, alteration, and presentation of his work (memoirs and polemic as well as poetry) is explored through his private and public life. The enormous and varied circle
of Yeats's friends, lovers, family, collaborators, and antagonists inhabit and enrich a personal world of astounding energy, artistic commitment, and verve. Yeats constantly re-created himself and his work, believing that art was 'not the chief end of life but an accident in one's search for reality': a search which brought him again and again back to his governing preoccupations: sex and death. He also held that 'all knowledge is biography', a belief reflected in this study of one of the
greatest lives of modern times.
Table of Contents:
Introduction: Accidence and Coherence
Prologue: Crossways
1: Accomplishment and Noh, 1915-1916
2: Shades and Angels, 1916-1917
3: The Sense of Happiness, 1917-1919
4: A Feeling for Revelation, 1919-1920
5: Weight and Measure in a Time of Dearth, 1920-1921
6: Living in the Explosion, 1922-1924
7: Bad Writers and Bishops, 1924-1925
8: Vanity and Pride, 1925-1927
9: Striking a Match, 1927-1930
10: One Last Burial, 1930-1932
11: Struggles Towards Reality, 1932-1933
12: A New Fanaticism, 1933-1934
13: Passionate Metaphysics, 1934-1935
14: Fire and Eating, 1936-1937
15: Folly and Elegance, 1937-1938
16: Dying Like an Empire, 1938-1939
Footnotes
Appendices
About the Author :
Roy Foster is Carroll Professor of Irish History at the University of Oxford, and a fellow of Hertford College. Professor Foster has written widely on Irish history, society and politics in the modern period, as well as on Victorian high politics and culture, and his publications include Lord Randolph Churchill: a Political Life (Oxford, 1981), Modern Ireland 1600-1972 (London, 1988), and The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making it up in
Ireland (London, 2001). The first volume of this biography, W.B. Yeats, A Life. I: The Apprentice Mage 1865-1914 was published by OUP in 1997.
Review :
`excellent and exhaustive biography.'
Edward Bradbury, Contemporary Review
`Foster splendidly rounds out the Celtic Twilight bard's inner revolution in his magnificent twilight years.'
Publishers Weekly
`[Foster] places Yeats in a scrupulously balanced context. While he does not hide the poet's reactionary views, he also demonstrates that those were free of the taint of anti-Semitism ... Foster is also an admirable interpreter of the poems.'
The Week
`Learned, scholarly and astonishly detailed, Roy Foster's two volume biography is a model of the serious literary life.'
The Economist Books of the Year 2003
`Foster gives Yeat's movements, his friendships and the historical background their due place in a narrative that is readable and engaging without losing sight, as most biographers do, of the strange, accidental and shapeless nature of life itself. Yeats is also allowed to emerge from these pages in all his power; his steely sense of direction and the completeness of his writing, despite all the flux and Celtic mists, are offered to us as a novelist might
offer a great and dynamic invention...Foster writes superbly.'
Colm Toibin, New Statesman
`To restore openness to each moment of a long, rich life requires a mastery of many different planes of narrative, all unfolding simultaneously ... Foster's gifts as a narrative historian, as well as his talent for archival research, mean that he is equal to the task... The amount of detail included in some paragraphs is quite astonishing, yet the prose never seems weighed down by this knowledge. The result is not only a major study in itself, but a trove
which will be mined by commentators for years to come.'
Declan Kiberd, Times Literary Supplement,
`magnificent'
Paul Muldoon, The Times
`Triumphant sequel The Apprentice Mage gave promise of a masterwork and the promise is fufilled in The Arch-Poet. What we have now is one of the greatest biographies, as affectionate as it is scholarly, intellectually equal to the tasks it sets itself'
Ferdinand Mount, Sunday Times Culture
Foster has rewritten history againas much an introduction to the fraught history to Irish nationalism as a definitive life of Ireland's best loved poet...
`In this lively new book Foster creates a balanced view of Yeat's poetry and his politics alike.'
Tara Pepper, Newsweek
`Every decent library should have it'
Lachlan Mackinnon, Daily Telegraph Saturday Arts
`one of the most scholarly and entertaining biographies of recent years'
Ferdinand Mount, The Sunday Times Culture
`Foster, the leading revisionist historian of Ireland, describes beautifully the impact on Irish politics of what he calls the laconic, visceral, uncompromising edge to the Anglo-Irish mind'
Ferdinand Mount, Sunday Times
`Roy Foster exemplifies the virtues of that Irish intellect so often invoked by Yeats himself, independent, vigorous, liberal and, on occasion, consciously provocative.'
Seamus Heaney, Financial Times magazine
The volume's distinctive and triumphant form... places the poems in relief against the personal and historical documentation... the great virtue of this method is that the poems become the isolated central issue, not wholly explicable by any amount of historical placing.
Foster's Life will now be one of the authoritative contexts for interpretation as well as for source study.
`The completion of this biography is in itself a moment of cultural rearticulation in Ireland. The work involved is staggering, but the narrative carries it with the ease of a lifting wave.'
Seamus Deane, The Irish Times
`'It is an achievement like that of Ellman on Joyce, or George Painter on Proust [Yeats's] life is here perfected as much as it imaginably could be and [his] work is, in consequence, irradiated.''
Seamus Deane, The Irish Times
`Yeats had no doubt that he would live on by various mystical means. We can only hope he can communicate from the Other Side his pleasure at being the subject of a biography to stand beside Ellman's James Joyce.'
Bernard O'Donoghue, Guardian Review
`An extraordinary achievement.. This is the biography no lover of Yeats's poetry can afford to be without.'
Mark Bostridge, The Independent on Sunday
`Review from other book by this author Foster's historian's instinct for the radiant revelatory detail is unerring and his narrative skill should be the envy of most novelists. The WBY delivered to us is set in the welter and cacophony of a busy life and struggling, often successfully, to shape that welter and that life to his own purposes. The chief glory of Foster's book is the nuanced and sympathetic understanding and comprehensive documentation he
brings to WBY's personal relationships. Just as the life demands our closest attention, Foster for his account of it to the Great War, deserves our deepest gratitude.'
Gerry Dukes, Irish Independent (Dublin)
`formidably detailed and illuminating book ... Foster has made a wonderful job of it, opting neither for hagiography nor demolition, recounting with gusto all the furores of the day, while still, despite the disclaimer, documenting Yeats' literary development with a discerning eye. Readers of this biography will be on tenterhooks awaiting Volume II.'
Patricia Craig, New Statesman & Society
`lengthy and enthralling first volume of a new life of the poet ... After turning the last pages of this book, I am panting for the second volume.'
Geoffrey Wheatcroft, The Express
`will surely be the definitive life of Yeats for at least a generation ... This is a spellbinding story of a man who himself used and wove spells all his life ... scholarly but elegantly written book.'
Tom Rosenthal, Daily Mail
`Foster's emphasis on "conditions" is especially rewarding for the illumination of Yeats's essays ... His painstaking research allows us to see their evolution in the poet's consciousness and in their usually varied publishing history. This is an amazing work of scholarship, vitalised by the affinities between Foster and WBY, fastidiously controlled, wonderfully illuminating. May the next volume arrive soon!'
Seamus Deane, The Guardian
`Roy Foster, well-known as a social and political historian, is a master of the data, both incidental and essential, of Yeats's career. The book is a mine of information, of various kinds and calibres.'
Karl Miller, Financial Times
`biography on the heroic scale ... the torrent of detail will engross future researchers'
John Carey, The Sunday Times
`This is the first volume of a work which should, when completed, be the definitive Life of Yeats. Even as it stands it is already a master work. Roy Foster is a first-class scholar, who is thoroughly at ease with his subject, and writes beautifully about it. This is a marvellous book, in a wide variety of ways. It is impossible in a relatively short review to give an adequate idea of the riches of this magnificent book.'
Conor Cruise O'Brien, The Sunday Telegraph
`The official biography ... is here at last ... R F Foster has a remarkably shrewd, worldy-wise sort of mind, at once tough and generous, and resists both idolatry and iconoclasm in this magnificently sane account ... a remarkably judicious, even-handed portrait, which in the snake-pit of Irish studies these days is something of a minor miracle.'
Terry Eagleton, The Independent
`magnificent, richly textured first volume ... this is a quite exceptional contribution to the field, and no Yeatsian worth the name will be able to do without it ... the fullest and most reliable account of Yeats's career ... The range of research and the exactitude of the scholarship make this required reading: the grace and wit of the style make it enjoyable reading.'
John Kelly, The Irish Times (Dublin)
`This is a strong candidate for literary biog of the year. Foster superbly recreates the period.'
Neil Sowerby, Manchester Evening News
`Roy Foster's extraordinary achievement in this marvellous first half of his life of Yeats, covering the first 50 years, is to lay bare the foolishness without in any way dimishing the greatness. Roy Foster's book has opened up new visions not just of Yeats but of the Irish culture he did so much to create.'
The Economist (UK)
`In this massively researched and magisterial first half of his authorised biography, Roy Foster writes with understated appropriate scepticism about Yeats the believer in magic and summoner of ghostly presences. Foster pulls off brilliantly the task of getting in behind the myths surrounding Yeats without cutting him facetiously down to size.'
Simon Carnell, Yorkshire Post (Leeds)
`Roy Foster gives the poet his rightful place at the heart of Irish matters ... Throughout the book there is the sense of a close relationshup between biographer and poet. The scale of this biography - 640 beautifully written pages - is an achievement in itself.'
Nathan Yates, The European (magazine section)
`The old magician, apprentice no longer, has found in Mr. Foster a worthy biographer ... the biographer is himself a fine writer, bearing with grace his knowledge of Irish history, and writing with wit, authority and, when appropriate, considerable eloquence.'
Thomas Flanagan, New York Times Book Review
`superb first volume of the definitive Yeats biography ... Much remains to be written about this renewing and wide-ranging life, and Foster, ... in this first volume promises a justifiably huge biography of compelling literary and historical interest.'
Florence O'Donoghue, Catholic Herald
`The first volume of Roy Foster's magisterial W B Yeats (OUP £25) has towered over the literary biographies.'
Terence Blacker, The Sunday Times
`In this mighty book Foster, the Irish historian, seems as much at home with textual variants and sexual psychology as with the social and political background.'
Independent on Sunday Review section, 13 July 1997
`Outstanding amongst all the fat biographies, Roy Foster's first volume of his W B Yeats: A Life (Oxford) combines entertaining readability with massive scholarship immersion in the poet's manifold activities and their historical background. Foster manages to cut through some of the myths surrounding this great figure without cutting him down to size.'
Simon Carnell, Yorkshire Post
`an instant classic - such style, wise humour and airy scholarship ... Another one to keep close by.'
Helen Osborne, The Sunday Telegraph
`Space restrictions confine me to a warm commendation of Roy Foster's meticulous and richly detailed opening to a two-volume life of Yeats.'
Miranda Seymour, The Sunday Times
`brought an historian's depth to the job'
Grey Gowrie, The Daily Telegraph
`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 arguably 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 1, 1998
