Ronald Schuchard - Böcker

Schuchard's critical study draws upon previously unpublished and uncollected materials in showing how T.S. Eliot's personal voice works through the sordid, the bawdy, the blasphemous, and the horrific to create a unique moral world and the only theory of moral criticism in English literature. The book also erodes conventional attitudes toward Eliot's intellectual and spiritual development, showing how early and consistently his classical and religious sensibility manifests itself in his poetry and criticism. The book examines his reading, his teaching, his bawdy poems, and his life-long attraction to music halls and other modes of popular culture to show the complex relation between intellectual biography and art.

Schuchard's critical study draws upon previously unpublished and uncollected materials in showing how Eliot's personal voice works through the sordid, the bawdy, the blasphemous, and the horrific to create a unique moral world and the only theory of moral criticism in English literature. The book also erodes conventional attitudes toward Eliot's intellectual and spiritual development, showing how early and consistently his classical and religious sensibility manifests itself in his poetry and criticism. The book examines his reading, his teaching, his bawdy poems, and his life-long attraction to music halls and other modes of popular culture to show the complex relation between intellectual biography and art.

The letters in this volume, the majority never before published, vividly document a tunultuous period in Yeats's life. They chart his transformation from a late Romantic, `Celtic' poet into a powerful and astringent modernist, the foundation of the Abbey Theatre and development of his own palywriting career, the emotional devastation of his beloved Maud Gonne's marriage to a man he despised, the encouragement of promising young writers including Joyce and Synge, and the impact of his first exposure to the United States. Letter by letter we see how private concerns and public controversies forced him to redefine his views on artistic freedom and responsibility, and to reshape his style. Rich and readable notes provide a narrative of these years, explaining allusions, and setting the correspondence in its cultural and political contexts as well as relating it to Yeats's canon as a whole. This book will be indispenable to anyone interested in the development of modern poetry, drama, and cultural history.

This volume covers a tumultuous period in Yeats's public and personal life, beginning with the acrimonious collapse of Maud Gonne's marriage to Major MacBride (who not only accused Yeats of being her lover but also threatened to shoot him). Dramas at the Abbey Theatre were hardly less intense, both on and off the stage: the euphoria which followed the successful opening of the new theatre quickly dispersed in a relentless cycle of quarrels and schisms. Yeats's attempts to turn an enthusiastic but ill-disciplined amateur society into a professional company led to a permanent division in the company, while the vagaries of Annie Horniman, the irascible patron of the theatre, put the whole movement under permanent tension. Violence actually broke out in January 1907 when the audience rioted at the production of John Synge's The Playboy of the Western World, believing it to be a libel on Ireland. Through all this we see Yeats maturing as an artist: discussing the writing and revising of his poems and plays, preparing the first elaborate American edition of his poems, and undertaking an ambitious eight-volume Collected Works through which he hoped to define his artistic personality. The letters not only record this energetic and often bruising period, but also bear witness to Yeats's indomitable fighting spirit and artistic integrity.

Shortly after the death of Algernon Swinburne in April 1909 Yeats announced to his sister that he was now 'King of the Cats'. Yet, as the letters in this volume demonstrate, although widely recognized as the leading poet in English, he was far less sure of himself than this triumphant boast suggests. Indeed, this volume tracks Yeats's unrelenting but often agonised attempts to redefine his positon as a poet in a time of aesthetic and personal transition and uncertainty, struggling, as he put it, to fashion 'an art of my own day' and amid 'doubtings, shrinkings, hatreds, reconciliations'. His letters about the eight-volume Collected Works, completed in these years, show him attempting to get his 'general personality' into his readers' minds, but always as 'a preliminary to new work'. What constituted 'personality', general or otherwise, was a contested area and in letter after letter he hammers out its relationship to 'character' in a debate which was to convert him from a late Romantic into an early Modernist. If many letters are concerned with the revision and reappraisal of old work, more reveal the insistent, and often frustrating, attempts to find new expression, particularly in the writing of The Player Queen, a process which, as he told a correspondent, convinced him that no fixed identity was possible. Developments in his personal life contributed to the sense of uncertainty and transition. In the spring of 1908 he began an affair with a new mistress, Mabel Dickinson, but ironically we find this rekindling and intensifying his feelings for his old love Maud Gonne, and for the first time they came close to a physical relationship, although she insisted that their 'spiritual marriage' would be purer if unconsummated. But the return to mystical sublimation was, after nearly twenty years of courtship, no longer satisfying to him; the situation, as he confessed in a letter, had set his 'nerves tight as a violin string but not one that makes sweet music'.More discordant music came from the Abbey Theatre. Early in 1908 the Fay brothers, founder members and mainstays of the Company resigned, and for a time it seemed that the whole project might come to an end. Over the next three years, as his correspondence eloquently reports, Yeats worked tirelessly to make sure this did not happen, encouraging new actors and playwrights, overseeing the evolution of a repertory structure, taking rehearsals often for weeks on end, battling with Fays for their misuse of the Irish National Theatre's name in America, mediating in the quarrels of the players, deflecting where he could the cantankerousness of the Theatre's patron, Annie Horniman, and, on her withdrawal of her subsidies, helping Lady Gregory in fund-raising, and in a final successful bid to renew the Abbey's patent. His exertions in the Theatre were much increased by the terminal illness of his friend and colleague John Synge (which, he confesses, 'for the first time in my life made death a reality to me'). The serious illness of Lady Gregory brought home to him his dependence on her and the ambience of her house, Coole Park; the massive mental breakdown of his companion Arthur Symons broke a remaining tie with the 1890s and the passing of his uncle and fellow occultist, George Pollexfen, severed his major link with Sligo. But, if these old relationships altered or disappeared, new ones were forged. Ezra Pound at last succeeded in meeting him and began encouraging him in his quest for 'an art of my own day', while Yeats himself fostered the talents of younger writers, notably the playwrights Lennox Robinson, T. C. Murray, St. John Ervine, and Lord Dunsany. By the end of the period, Yeats, who we see brought to edge of a nervous breakdown in 1909, and defying the Establishment in producing Shaw's Blanco Posnet, became a man of affairs: pressed to apply for Professorships at Trinity College and the new National University, elected a founding member of the British Academy of Letters, and the recipient of a Civil List pension. The recasting of The Golden Helmet, first produced in the early months of his volume, as The Green Helmet of two years later, indicates how the discussions and soul-searching disclosed by his letters had begun to bear fruit. Less now a play satirizing Irish divisions and jealousies than a celebration of Nietzschean tragic joy and Castiglionean sprezzatura, it indicates the qualities Yeats had learned to prize over the intervening three years.

Recovering a lost literary movement that was the most consuming preoccupation of W. B. Yeats's literary life and the most integral to his poetry and drama, Ronald Schuchard's The Last Minstrels provides an historical, biographical, and critical reconstruction of the poet's lifelong attempt to restore an oral tradition by reviving the bardic arts of chanting and musical speech. From the beginning of his career Yeats was determined to return the 'living voice' of the poet from exile to the centre of culture - on its platforms, stages, and streets - thereby establishing a spiritual democracy in the arts for the non-reading as well as the reading public. Schuchard's study enhances our understanding of Yeats's cultural nationalism, his aims for the Abbey Theatre, and his dynamic place in a complex of interrelated arts in London and Dublin. With a wealth of new archival materials, the narrative intervenes in literary history to show the attempts of Yeats and Florence Farr to take the 'new art' of chanting to Great Britain, America, and Europe, and it reveals for the first time the influence of their auditory poetics on the visual paradigm of the Imagists. The penultimate chapter examines the adjustments Yeats made for his movement during the war, including chanting and other adaptations from Noh drama for his dance plays and choruses, until the practice of his 'unfashionable art' became dormant in the 1920s before the restless rise of realism. The final chapter resurrects his heroic effort in the 1930s to reunite poetry and music and reconstitute his dream of a spiritual democracy through the medium of public broadcasting.

Recovering a lost literary movement that was the most consuming preoccupation of W. B. Yeats's literary life and the most integral to his poetry and drama, Ronald Schuchard's The Last Minstrels provides an historical, biographical, and critical reconstruction of the poet's lifelong attempt to restore an oral tradition by reviving the bardic arts of chanting and musical speech. From the beginning of his career Yeats was determined to return the 'living voice' of the poet from exile to the centre of culture - on its platforms, stages, and streets - thereby establishing a spiritual democracy in the arts for the non-reading as well as the reading public. Schuchard's study enhances our understanding of Yeats's cultural nationalism, his aims for the Abbey Theatre, and his dynamic place in a complex of interrelated arts in London and Dublin. With a wealth of new archival materials, the narrative intervenes in literary history to show the attempts of Yeats and Florence Farr to take the 'new art' of chanting to Great Britain, America, and Europe, and it reveals for the first time the influence of their auditory poetics on the visual paradigm of the Imagists. The penultimate chapter examines the adjustments Yeats made for his movement during the war, including chanting and other adaptations from Noh drama for his dance plays and choruses, until the practice of his 'unfashionable art' became dormant in the 1920s before the restless rise of realism. The final chapter resurrects his heroic effort in the 1930s to reunite poetry and music and reconstitute his dream of a spiritual democracy through the medium of public broadcasting.