The Oxford Handbook of W B Yeats

The forty-two chapters in this book consider Yeats’s early toil, his practical and esoteric concerns as his career developed, his friends and enemies, and how he was and is understood. This Handbook brings together critics and writers who have considered what Yeats wrote and how he wrote, moving between texts and their contexts in ways that will lead the reader through Yeats’s multiple selves as poet, playwright, public figure, and mystic.

It assembles a variety of views and adds to a sense of dialogue, the antinomian or deliberately-divided way of thinking that Yeats relished and encouraged. This volume puts that sense of a living dialogue in tune both with the history of criticism on Yeats and also with contemporary critical and ethical debates, not shirking the complexities of Yeats’s more uncomfortable political positions or personal life. It provides one basis from which future Yeats scholarship can continue to participate in the fascination of all the contributors here in the satisfying difficulty of this great writer.

Lauren Arrington, Professor of English, Maynooth University, Matthew Campbell, Professor of English, University of York

Lauren Arrington is Professor of English at Maynooth University where she also serves as Head of Department. She is the author of three monographs in the fields of twentieth-century literature and drama, most recently The Poets of Rapallo (OUP, 2021). Her writing has appeared in scholarly and popular publications including TLS and LitHub. From 2018 to 2021, she served as co-Director of the International Yeats Summer School.

Matthew Campbell is Professor of Modern Literature at the University of York. He is the author of Irish Poetry under the Union (CUP, 2013) and Rhythm and Will in Victorian Poetry (CUP, 1999). He has edited or co-edited five other books, including The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish Poetry (2003) and Irish Literature in Transition, 1830-1880 (CUP, 2020). He was Co-Director of the Yeats International Summer School from 2013 to 2019.