Reconstructing Yeats: The Secret Rose and The Wind Among the Reeds

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Rowman & Littlefield, 1986 - Literary Criticism - 242 pages
This book focuses on the two works in the subtitle as well as on unpublished manuscripts and notebooks in the Yeats collection of the National Library of Ireland. The author argues that by the end of the 1890s Yeats had developed a coherent symbolic system based on his work with Irish folklore and mythology and that this system is most clearly delineated in the first editions of the work and in Yeats's unpublished papers. The book begins with a study of Yeats's Irish and Celtic sources, then moves on to outline the symbolic theory, drawing heavily on Yeats's notebooks. The theory is then applied in a critical study of the poems, prose, and plays of the last half of the 1890s.
 

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Contents

Story and System Text and Context
11
Mythological to Monastic Ireland
26
3 The Seventeenth Century
55
The Eighteenth Century
73
The End of Two Millennia
103
The Lyric the Ballad and the Sequence
136
Rhythm and Metre A Subtler Enchantment
147
The Liturgy of Symbolic Action
167
Conclusion
212
Notes
219
Index
237
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Page 8 - THE COMING OF WISDOM WITH TIME THOUGH leaves are many, the root is one; Through all the lying days of my youth I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun; Now I may wither into the truth.

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