Blood Kindred
W. B. Yeats, the Life, the Death, the Politics
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- £9.99
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- £9.99
Publisher Description
In June 1934, W. B. Yeats gratefully received the award of a Goethe-Plakette from Oberburgermeister Krebs, four months after his early play The Countess Cathleen had been produced in Frankfurt by SS Untersturmfuhrer Bethge. Four years later, the poet publicly commended Nazi legislation before leaving Dublin to die in southern France. These hitherto neglected, isolated and scandalous details stand at the heart of this reflective study of Yeats's life, his attitudes towards death, and his politics.
Blood Kindred identifies an obsession with family as the link connecting Yeats's late engagement with fascism to his Irish Victorian origins in suburban Dublin and industrializing Ulster. It carefully documents and analyses his involvement with both Maud Gonne and her daughter Iseult, his secretive consultations with Irish army officers during his Senate years, his incidental anti-Semitism, and his approval of the right-wing royalist group L'Action Française in the 1920s.
The familiar peaks and troughs of Irish history, such as the 1916 Rising and the death of Parnell, are re-oriented within a radical new interpretation of Yeats's life and thought, his poetry and plays. As far as possible Bill McCormack lets Yeats speak for himself through generous quotation from his newly accessible correspondence. The result is a combative, entertaining biography which allows Ireland's greatest literary figure to be seen in the round for the first time.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Yeats has had plenty of attention in recent years (most notably a two-volume life by R.F. Foster), but McCormack believes that previous biographers have been too willing to overlook what he sees as the poet's association with fascism in his last years (he died in 1939). Even Richard Ellmann, McCormack says, failed to mention Yeats's acceptance of an award from Nazi Germany in 1934. Where others reputedly have allowed only that Yeats "flirted" with fascism, McCormack sees a more intense relationship. Yeats's favorable comments about Nazi Germany play a part in this argument, but McCormack also relies heavily on guilt by association, sketching out the fascist and anti-Semitic tendencies of members of Yeats's inner circle, including Maud Gonne and her daughter Iseult. This is not quite convincing, especially when invoking people who knew Yeats's friends but not the poet himself. McCormack, a former professor of literary history at the University of London, tends to make grand and repeated announcements about his aim instead of simply getting on with the story. His life study also assumes the reader has a deep familiarity with its subject, with frequent reference to incidents that will leave less informed readers puzzled. While the political revisionism is straightforward enough, the attempt to link it to Yeats's poetic and spiritual beliefs makes for maddeningly tough going.
