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    The Life & Works of W. B. Yeats
    The Life & Works of W. B. Yeats
    The Life & Works of W. B. Yeats
    Audiobook2 hours

    The Life & Works of W. B. Yeats

    Written by William Butler Yeats

    Narrated by Jim Norton, Denys Hawthorne, Marcella Riordan and Nicholas Boulton

    5/5

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    About this audiobook

    The Life of William Butler Yeats is a remarkable one – poet, playwright, essayist, politician, occultist, astrologer, founder of a national theatre, voluminous correspondent, lover, husband and father. It was a life that extended to a packed, sometimes frantic seventy-three years and left us with what many consider to be one of the finest collections of poetry from one voice.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNaxos Audiobooks
    Release dateJul 1, 2002
    ISBN9789629546793
    The Life & Works of W. B. Yeats
    Author

    William Butler Yeats

    W.B. Yeats (1865-1939) was an Irish poet. Born in Sandymount, Yeats was raised between Sligo, England, and Dublin by John Butler Yeats, a prominent painter, and Susan Mary Pollexfen, the daughter of a wealthy merchant family. He began writing poetry around the age of seventeen, influenced by the Romantics and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, but soon turned to Irish folklore and the mystical writings of William Blake for inspiration. As a young man he joined and founded several occult societies, including the Dublin Hermetic Order and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, participating in séances and rituals as well as acting as a recruiter. While these interests continued throughout Yeats’ life, the poet dedicated much of his middle years to the struggle for Irish independence. In 1904, alongside John Millington Synge, Florence Farr, the Fay brothers, and Annie Horniman, Yeats founded the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, which opened with his play Cathleen ni Houlihan and Lady Gregory’s Spreading the News and remains Ireland’s premier venue for the dramatic arts to this day. Although he was an Irish Nationalist, and despite his work toward establishing a distinctly Irish movement in the arts, Yeats—as is evident in his poem “Easter, 1916”—struggled to identify his idealism with the sectarian violence that emerged with the Easter Rising in 1916. Following the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922, however, Yeats was appointed to the role of Senator and served two terms in the position. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923, and continued to write and publish poetry, philosophical and occult writings, and plays until his death in 1939.

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    • 5/5
      The Spirits talked through Yeats' wife while she was in a trance-like state. Not for someone who is looking for a quick Astrology fix. How many voters know much, if anything, about Yeats' background in Magick, etc. That he shows up in one of Crowley's novels as the decidedly inferior poet Gates. That he and the Great Beast had 'psychic skirmishes. That he proposed to Maude Gonne several times and was turned down repeatedly. He even proposed to Gonne's daugter Iseult He became a randy old goat after a late start.
    • 5/5
      Another gift from Naxos. This two-hour programme doesn't go into Yeats' life in depth but gives us a good feel for the man himself and is interspersed with excellent readings of some of his greatest and also some of his less well-known poems.