W.B. Yeats: The Arch-Poet 

This is a superb and illuminating generous and entertaining talk. I love Professor Foster and he reopens my eyes to the wonder of W.B.Yeats.

Stumbled upon this book in the library, laughed at the size of it, it’s a tome. I opened it convinced that the writer would be self indulgent and the editor obviously useless, no book needs to be this large. And now I can’t put it down. It’s a stunning delight. Written with profound sensitivity, and deeply mysterious. Lady Gregory, Maund Goone, Iseult all come to life as fully living beings. I am fascinated by the paranormal, preoccupied by Swedenborg, mediumship, aliens and fairies, and find so many parallels with Yeats magical thinking. In an age of deadening literalism, I love Yeats’ approach to life, his astute discernment, his high minded intellectualism coupled with bouts of folly and confusion. His willingness to explore the other world was embedded in his dna. I now wonder if that is an aspect of creativity. Foster has written so skilfully, an unbelievably compelling, unputdownable book. Foster is present in the biography but as a kind, loyal, true friend to Yeats. Honest and forgiving. Sharp. Wry. Witty.In a weird way I don’t know who I have fallen for more, Yeats or Foster? Both seem remarkable men to me.

An excellent presentation. The use of precise details and the revelation of relationships between people, movements and works is masterly. Thanks for posting it.

Thanks for posting...this is a wonderfully value ...

re the two questioners who are trying to link yeats to fascists ideas thru his interest in the occult specifically the golden dawn. his wife George - very importanbt distinction - was highly psychic according to her family and was an anthroposophist with Rudolf Steiner, at one point in his life Goethe's editor and who also broke with the Theosophists for their false claims, whose Waldorf Schools and bio-dynamic agriculture and legacy of some 6,000 lectures sixty books etc - was a strong public supporter of the French (Jewish) officer Dreyfuss to the extent it hurt his career so-called. As the Nazis rose to power they hated him torched the all wood hand carved Goetheanum in Switzerland because he out spoke out forcefully in his lectures about their evil identity. A lifelong Steiner student told me something that the Dr. Ehrenfried Pfeiffer had told him - that Steiner had been poisoned at a social gathering from which he died, attributed to the Nazis. This is all to clarify the uninformed simplistic two hop "connection" from Yeats to nazis. hardly

Arch revisionist historian.