Words Alone: Yeats and His Inheritances - by R.F. Foster

The author of a two-volume biography of W.B. Yeats that was hailed in the New York Review of Books as "a triumph of scholarship, thought, and empathy such as one would hardly have thought possible in this age of disillusion," Oxford Irish history professor Roy Foster here turns his focus to the largely unacknowledged influences that shaped the young Yeats. So dramatic and revolutionary was Yeats's impact on Irish literature that the writers and traditions that preceded him are often overlooked, just as his successors are often overshadowed by his achievement. In Words Alone, Foster explores the Irish literary traditions that Yeats grew up with, including romantic "national tales" in post-Union Ireland and Scotland, the nationalist poetry and polemic of the Young Ireland movement, the occult and supernatural fictions of Sheridan LeFanu, the "peasant fictions" of William Carleton, and the fairy lore and folktale collections of his childhood. Foster then discusses recent critical and inte