Yeats and Afterwords

<p>In <i>Yeats and Afterwords</i> contributors articulate W. B. Yeats's powerful multilayered sense of belatedness as part of his complex literary method. They explore how Yeats deliberately positioned himself at various historical endpoints--of Romanticism of the Irish colonial experience of the Ascendancy of civilization itself--and in doing so created a distinctively modernist poetics of iteration capable of registering the experience of finality and loss. While the crafting of such a poetics remained a constant throughout Yeats's career the particular shape it took varied over time depending on which lost object Yeats was contemplating. By tracking these vicissitudes the volume offers new ways of thinking about the overarching trajectory of Yeats's poetic engagements.</p><p><i>Yeats and Afterwords</i> proceeds in three stages involving past-pastness present-pastness and future-pastness. The first The Last Romantics examines how Yeats repeats classic motifs and verbal formulations from his literary forebears in order to express the circumscribed cultural options with which he struggles. The essays in this section often uncover Yeats's relation to sources and precursors that are surprising or have been relatively neglected by scholars. The second section Yeats and Afterwords looks at how Yeats subjects his own past sentiments insights and styles to critical negation crafting his own afterwords in various ways. The last section Yeats's Aftertimes explores how thanks to the stature Yeats achieved through its invention his style of belatedness itself comes to be reiterated by other writers. Yeats is a towering figure in literary history hard to follow and harder to avoid and later writers often found themselves producing words that were in some sense his afterwords.</p>