"Nowadays, whether he is thought of as a national bard or a world poet, Yeats figures in the mind as a translated force, an energy released and a destiny fulfilled.
Still, as a poet with a strong histrionic streak and a readiness to identify himself with variously anti-establishment and anti-populist causes in the course of a long lifetime, Yeats was never without his detractors. Yet from the beginning, those most intent upon debunking the man or demythologizing the poet could never deny that his commitments were as selfless as they were ardent. Neither George Moore (Yeat's senior) nor James Joyce (his junior) ever doubted that the phenomenon known as the Irish Literary Revival represented the execution of high artistic purpose, although both of them found fault with Yeats's ways of discharging that purpose. Moore, as a fellow member of the middle-class, mocked him for affecting a Renaissance hauteur and for getting carried away by his aristocratic fantasies. Joyce, more indigent and less socially advantaged, was oddly enough enraged by what he perceived as the poet's downward mobility ...
What Joyce could not know, of course, was that a new, convulsive energy was building in the poet as the effort to bind himself to a national purpose - 'Theatre business, management of men' - collided with his antithetical and more powerful drive to assert the claims of individual personality over every solidarity. A decade later, in Responsibilities (1914) and The Wild Swans at Coole (1919), a poetry of singular clarity and detachment would spring from the tension generated in him between his ideal of service to a new, imagined Ireland and his recognition of the demeaned standards actually preferred by the Ireland in which he was living. It all contributed to the emergence of a new poetic voice, intellectually pugnacious, emotionally renovated and rhetorically high-spirited."
from Introduction, by Seamus Heaney
W. B. Yeats: Poems selected by Seamus Heaney
2000 Faber and Faber, London
18 May 2013
14 May 2013
Virginia Woolf
"And just as she tells the history of the lives of women in
this country in very emotional terms, so she describes writing, and reading, of
novels, as a very emotional business. ‘A novel starts in us all sorts of
antagonistic and opposed emotions.’ Novels are made up of ‘many different kinds
of emotions’: and so are readings of novels, where ‘our private prejudices’
have ‘an immense sway’ upon us. What she is trying to work out is what kind of
emotions have gone into the writing of women’s novels, and why, and what kind
of emotions they have been read with. And, finally, whether these complicated
feelings, in writers and readers, can change. A vital part of the argument of A Room of One’s Own is that literature –
the writing and reading of it – can’t be separated out from our social or
economic conditions, our material environment, our upbringing or our education.
This is a pragmatic, realist, political approach to art, not (as it so often
said of Woolf) an elitist or escapist one."
"Jerks, flashes, and checks,
interrupt her own narrative: ‘the flash of some terrible reality’ in the garden
at Fernham, brutally interrupted by the arrival of the soup …
thoughts on the psychology of sex
interrupted by the necessity of paying the bill; the torn web of women’s
fictions; the obstacles and impediments to their work; the ‘bursting’ and
‘splitting’ and ‘barring’ in Lady Winchilsea’s writing; the ‘awkward break’ in Jane Eyre which allows in Charlotte
Bronte’s anger ... "
"Yet the overall effect of A Room of One’s Own is smoothness and control, of a writer who knows where she is going. And since what Woolf is recommending, or hoping for is a woman’s writing which will get beyond awkward jerking and breaks into the calm and integrity and fusion of an ‘androgynous’ writing, which doesn’t have to be self-conscious or angry or broken-backed …"
"As Woolf says, once the woman writer is free, she is going to ‘knock’ the novel ‘into shape for herself’. That’s exactly what Woolf is doing here. She is making ‘a shape for herself’ which no one else has ever invented (part fiction, part essay, part conversation, part history, part meditation) in order to provide a space – a room of her own, which is this book – for a story about women."
from Introduction by Hermione Lee (2001)
Vintage Books, London
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)