Yeats, William Butler - William Archer (essay date 1902)
William Archer (essay date 1902)
SOURCE: "William Butler Yeats," in Poets of the Younger Generation, John Lane/The Bodley Head, 1902 (reprinted by Scholarly Press, 1969), pp. 531-57.
[In the following excerpt, Archer notes that Yeats's early Celtic themes were an outgrowth of his personality and beliefs and not affectations of a current style.]
It is with Mr. Yeats that, so far as I know, the genuine spirit of Irish antiquity and Irish folk-lore makes its first entrance into English verse. Irish poets before him have either been absorbed in love, potheen, and politics—as Mr. Yeats himself puts it, they have "sung their loudest when a company of rebels or revellers has been at hand to applaud"—or (like Goldsmith and Moore) they have become to all intents and purposes Anglicised. Even William Allingham's fairies, pleasant little people though they be, are rather Anglo-Saxon Brownies than Keltic Sheogues. In Mr. Yeats we have an...
[The entire page is 1544 words long]
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