• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF YEATS CRITICISM 1887-1965 A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF YEATS CRITICISM 1887-1965 by K. G. W. CROSS and R. T. DUNLOP With a foreword by A. NORMAN JEFFARES Macmillan Education © R. T. Dunlop and the Estate of K. G. W. Cross 1971 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1971 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without permission. First published 1971 by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD London and Basingstoke Associated companies in New York Toronto Dublin Melbourne Johannesburg and Madras SBN 333 05008 8 ISBN 978-1-349-00343-3 ISBN 978-1-349-00341-9 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-00341-9 Contents Foreword, by A. Norman Jeffares vii Introduction x1 William Butler Yeats, 1865-1939: A Chronology of the Works xix Part I Bibliographies, Concordances and Descriptions of Yeatsiana I II Reviews ofWritings by W. B. Yeats 13 III Books and Pamphlets Wholly or Partly about W. B. Yeats 59 IV Commemorative and Special Issues of Periodicals 159 V Articles Wholly or Partly about W. B. Yeats 165 VI Dissertations and Theses 277 List of Newspapers and Periodicals Cited 293 Index 304 v Foreword This most useful account of the vast amount of wntmg on W. B. Yeats has been compiled over many years by the late Professor K. G. W. Cross of the University of Newcastle, New South Wales, and by his friend and sometime colleague at the University of Sydney, Mr R. T. Dunlop. In writing this foreword to introduce their work it seemed to me that I should say something of Professor Cross, whose early death cut short a most promising academic career and deprived his many friends of the friendship of an unusually lively and gifted man. Kenneth Gustav Walter Cross grew up in Norfolk, and was edu­ cated at Diss Grammar School. After three years in the Royal Army Educational Corps he read English and French at Trinity College, Dublin. This was at a period when the English School was run by Professor H. 0. White, benign and only apparently absent-minded; his colleagues were Dr Fitzroy Pyle and Mr R. B. D. French. All three blended - as did Dr Sheehy Skeffington of the School of French - the imparting of knowledge with a sociable informality. It was a civilised atmosphere to which Gus Cross responded with delight. After winning his First Class Moderatorship he became Lefroy Stein Research Fellow in Trinity College and began work on John Marston under Fitzroy Pyle's supervision. This resulted in a thesis crammed with exhaustive work: indeed it could have been sent to the printer on its completion. But this was one of the many things Gus Cross might have done one day - he was fastidious in assessing his own work, and so we can read only a dozen articles (and two dozen notes on Marston's vocabulary) on such diverse matters as dating the plays and a general assessment of Marston. Out of his deep interest in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century drama came Cross's knowledge of bibliography and the minutiae of scholar­ ship. He thought the state of most of the texts of seventeenth-century drama left much to be desired. One of the last evenings I spent with him, in Leeds in 1963, was devoted to drawing up a scheme for old spelling texts. This resulted in the Fountainwell Drama Texts, a series which Robin Lorimer the publisher and I had had in mind for some years, to the planning of which Cross brought his own special brand of missionary zeal. Cross himself was engaged in editing two Shakespeare texts for this series in his last two years - the standard of his editorial work can be seen in his edition of Titus Andronicus (a Pelican Shakespeare, 1965). He had much imagination in suggesting texts and editors for Vll A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF YEATS CRITICISM them, and, as befitted an honorary Dubliner, his conversational com­ ments were flippant, witty and gay, a foil to the common sense ofhis serious arguments. Cross, however, was a man of inclusive tastes in his scholarship. His education at Trinity had encouraged this, and he had a passionate interest in the Anglo-Irish literary revival - in Synge and Yeats especially - while he could recite long passages from all of Joyce's writings with gusto and delight. His reading in French literature ran far beyond anything expected of a first-class graduate and his collection of French books was large. But his whole appetite for literature was enormous. Twentieth-century American literature he knew very well indeed, and his 'Writers and Critics' study of F. Scott Fitzgerald reveals his appreciative attitude to writers whose work he admired. When he left Dublin he taught for a time at Rhodes University, Grahamstown, where he disliked the current attitudes to black Africans. Once he moved to Australia (he held university posts, first in Adelaide, then in Sydney and fmally in Newcastle) he indulged his hydropic thirst for knowledge by plunging into the reading of Australian literature. To this he brought a critical view particularly sympathetic: used to making comparisons, he believed in the importance - and the immediacy - of writing in rapidly developing countries. He came to Leeds to teach Australian Literature as our Visiting Fellow in Commonwealth Literature in 1963, and during his time in Yorkshire we began to edit a volume ofessays to commemorate the centenary ofYeats's birth, In Excited Reverie. As he toured the United States in the autumn of 1963 Gus hurled letter after letter at me, filled with pleasure and excitement as the book took shape and as he met many of the scholars whose work he admired. Although by now he knew his days were numbered, his temperament did not allow him any self-commiseration or any world-weary air. In the Jacobeans and perhaps in Joyce he found pessimism enough to satisfy him; but he weighed up his own life in such a way that delight over­ came despair. This balancing often led him to an endearing self­ mockery - he had acquired in Dublin an Irish capacity to tell a story against himsel£ Yet he was drawn to the positive and the creative: in American, in Australian, and especially in Anglo-Irish writers. His interest in Yeats was deep, and in his 1963 visit to Europe and America he added new items to his already profound knowledge of what had been written on Yeats, and indeed on the work of his critics. This amalgam of scholar in seventeenth-century drama and savant in modem writing and criticism was a man whose eyes could dance with Vlll FOREWORD excited enthusiasm or amusement: his laugh was bound to emerge at some stage in any conversation. He was indeed an excellent conver­ sationalist with a sense of dramatic intensity as well as a relish for the absurd. He was kind, generous - even careless - with his money when he had any, and he never had, nor ever would have had enough, be­ cause he used it fully as a means to other ends: hospitality mainly, the buying of books incessantly. All his life was lived as though in some sub­ conscious extra awareness of its brevity. And so he crammed it full with work and enjoyment. Yet, paradoxically, he seemed to be hom un­ lucky. Things happened to him in an endless succession of misfortunes, small and large. He always shook these troubles off, after brief moments of intense private melancholia and perhaps after a quick worried har­ angue of one of his many friends, something bound to end in his firm changing of the subject with an invitation to a drink, a meal, or the contemplation of some ironic absurdity oflife or literature or both. Always he was a kind and lovable person, for he had an instinctive friendliness and was baffled by the malice or mischief-making propensi­ ties of others, even at times by their dullness. His sense of pleasure in varied experience was conveyed to others with gay generosity, an unselfconscious disregard for the conventions, and an enthusiasm which overflowed into so many different directions : he liked art, and so he painted well; he liked speed and so he drove cars, both large and small, with dash and a certain amount of abandon; he liked parties and talk and so he liked people; and this is the quality which gave his Renaissance-like multiplicity of character its integrity of purpose. He was in the right place as a professor: he was a scholar rather than an administrator; he conveyed encouragement as well as giving help to others; and he was a teacher, not an indoctrinator. This is perhaps why he sought to provide-as in this bibliography-the materials upon which others would form their own opinions and judgements. His ambition from his undergraduate days had been to be a professor whose work would be known and lasting. He worked extremely hard. Yet there was not time enough, not nearly enough, in his thirty-'nine years to match his intellectual appetency and the scholarly achievement he desired. It will be some small solace to his friends and family that Mr Dunlop has completed the work on this bibliography which in its account of Y eatsian scholarship and criticism should prove an invaluable work of reference. Ledenon, France, 1970 A. NoRMAN JEFFARES IX Introduction Katharine Tynan published her review of Mosada in 1887, taking up publicly and with relish the task that Gerard Manley Hopkins evaded privately when John Butler Yeats showed him his son's poems.

Load more

  23

Copy Link