BL. W. B. Yeats

     

27. Autobiographies: Reveries Over Childhood and Youth and the Trembling of the Veil. Collected Edition of the Works of W. B. Yeats, vol. 6. London: Macmillan, 1926. Enlarged as The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats. London: Macmillan, 1938. Enlarged as Autobiographies. London: Macmillan, 1955.

All editions reprint ‘Four Years, 1887-1891’ (18); the enlarged editions include ‘The Bounty of Sweden’ (25) and the following.

a. ‘Estrangement: Extracts from a Diary Kept in 1909’. In section XLVII Yeats reveals that he has been occupied with ‘Binyon’s book on Eastern Painting’, surely a reference to Painting in the Far East (BC2), and that it has reminded him of the importance of the ‘literary element’ in East Asian art, which he equates both with the ‘moral element’ in poetry and with aesthetic ‘tradition’, and contrasts to the ‘vulgarity’ of ‘modern art’, for ‘supreme art is a traditional statement, passed on from age to age, modified by individual genius, but never abandoned’. He makes a similar point, again in reference to Binyon’s work, in 25; see also 10, 48, 54, 80, 129, and 228.

 

 

 

 


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