Discoveries: A Volume of Essays

By W B Yeats

W.B. Yeats was an Irish poet who was one of the biggest contributors to the Irish Literary Revival of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  In 1923, Yeats became the first Irishman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.  This edition of Discoveries: A Volume of Essays includes a table of contents.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Charles River Editors
• Release date: Mar 22, 2018
• ISBN: 9781518341649

W B Yeats

William Butler Yeats was born in 1865 in County Dublin. With his much-loved early poems such as 'The Stolen Child', and 'He Remembers Forgotten Beauty', he defined the Celtic Twilight mood of the late-Victorian period and led the Irish Literary Renaissance. Yet his style evolved constantly, and he is acknowledged as a major figure in literary modernism and twentieth-century European letters. T. S. Eliot described him as 'one of those few whose history is the history of their own time, who are part of the consciousness of an age which cannot be understood without them'. W. B. Yeats died in 1939.

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DISCOVERIES: A VOLUME OF ESSAYS

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W. B. Yeats

KYPROS PRESS

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Copyright © 2015 by W. B. Yeats

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Discoveries: A Volume of Essays

PROPHET, PRIEST AND KING

PERSONALITY AND THE INTELLECTUAL ESSENCES

THE MUSICIAN AND THE ORATOR

A BANJO PLAYER

THE LOOKING-GLASS

THE TREE OF LIFE

THE PRAISE OF OLD WIVES’ TALES

THE PLAY OF MODERN MANNERS

HAS THE DRAMA OF CONTEMPORARY LIFE A ROOT OF ITS OWN

WHY THE BLIND MAN IN ANCIENT TIMES WAS MADE A POET

CONCERNING SAINTS AND ARTISTS

THE SUBJECT MATTER OF DRAMA

THE TWO KINDS OF ASCETICISM

IN THE SERPENT’S MOUTH

THE BLACK AND THE WHITE ARROWS

HIS MISTRESS’S EYEBROWS

THE TRESSES OF THE HAIR

A TOWER ON THE APENNINE

THE THINKING OF THE BODY

RELIGIOUS BELIEF NECESSARY TO SYMBOLIC ART

DISCOVERIES: A VOLUME OF ESSAYS

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PROPHET, PRIEST AND KING

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THE LITTLE THEATRICAL COMPANY I write my plays for had come to a west of Ireland town and was to give a performance in an old ball-room, for there was no other room big enough. I went there from a neighbouring country house and arriving a little before the players, tried to open a window. My hands were black with dirt in a moment and presently a pane of glass and a part of the window frame came out in my hands. Everything in this room was half in ruins, the rotten boards cracked under my feet, and our new proscenium and the new boards of the platform looked out of place, and yet the room was not really old, in spite of the musicians’ gallery over the stage. It had been built by some romantic or philanthropic landlord some three or four generations ago, and was a memory of we knew not what unfinished scheme.

From there I went to look for the players and called for information on a young priest, who had invited them, and taken upon himself the finding of an audience. He lived in a high house with other priests, and as I went in I noticed with a whimsical pleasure a broken pane of glass in the fan-light over the door, for he had once told me the story of an old woman who a good many years ago quarrelled with the bishop, got drunk, and hurled a stone through the painted glass. He was a clever man, who read Meredith and Ibsen, but some of his books had been packed in the fire-grate by his house-keeper, instead of the customary view of an Italian lake or the coloured