W.B. Yeats went to great lengths to design his self-image which biographers have been slow to challenge. Following on from "Blood Kindred" (2005), Mc Cormack’s new study of the poet’s idealist views concentrates on the role of J.M. Hone in introducing him to George Berkeley’s philosophy in the mid 1920s and to contemporary Italian thinkers such as Giovanni Gentile and Mario Manlio Rossi. The notion of sacrifice is examined and, by way of contrast, work by Synge, George Moore and Samuel Beckett is shown to challenge the demand for sacrifice which underlies many powerful philosophies of culture. This is a detailed and yet wide-ranging critique of twentieth-century Irish literature, illuminating both well-known and obscure figures.
Table of Contents
Introduction 1 Non-Reflective Vision - 1.1 Logic or panic 1.2 George Berkeley in Europe 1.3 Yeats and German thought in the 1930s 2 Fate, Myth and the absolute - 2.1 Italy and the enigma of ’Hone and Rossi’ 2.2 ’Good strong blows are delights to the mind’ 2.3 Lapsed knowledge, with resurgent sacrifice 2.4 A few notes on Irish studies 3 Critique of Instances - Ireland for the Most Part a Late Prelude - 3.1 Not Christ, but Christy - notes from a Borderland of 1907 3.2 Advancing on the past - some poems of Patrick Pearse 3.3 The Brook Kerith (1916) - George Moore against sacrifice Yeats on Easter 4 Critique of Instances - Paris and (is it?) Wall Street 4.1 A French Berkeley of 2007 4.2 ’Disturbed by print’ - Samuel Beckett’s pretext Appendices I Giovanni Amendola on Berkeley IIA A List of Publications concerning twentieth-century German thought preserved in W. B. Yeats’s library [at the time of his death, with details of surviving manuscript annotation] IIB Some further works of German interest used by Yeats [but absent from the O’Shea catalogue] III Chronological select list of texts by George Berkeley separately published in Continental Europe, 1920-6 IV Towards a chronology of publications by J. M. Hone V ’John McGoldrick and the Quaker’s daughter’ Bibliography Index.