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Rating: 
Summary: Dream Time
Review: This is an essential read for any Yeats fan. It shows his will to believe at its most naked, before the gyres and slouching Sphinxes forged it into System. You can see Yeats mapping the wistful melancholy of his early poems onto the village folklore around his family home in Sligo--already in 1893, he's looking for a way to weld his personal interests in aestheticism and the occult to a wider national cause. You'll also find the seeds of the older proto-Fascist Yeats in his worship of lineage, parochial peasant wisdom and anti-modernism (the faery folk, along with the Great Anglo-Irish houses, have sadly for Yeats all but disappeared). The dreamy villagers he meets with turn back the clock against "that decadence we call progress" in a way that the poet at 28 already finds powerfully attractive. Most of Yeats's early poems can be linked to a vignette from "The Celtic Twilight," while recurring motifs from his later writings--beauty, passionate old age, ghosts--take on a deeper resonance after reading these lighter pieces. Yeats walks a fine line between believing in the faeries that so many of the peasants he talks to can see, and regarding them simply as "dramatizations of our moods," an example of the tragic Celtic taste for unreachable beauty that he wanted to capture in his poems. Yeats walked that line in one form or another his whole life, and I understood the poems much better after reading these sketches--for that alone, this book's worth a read.
Rating:
Summary: Dream Time
Review: This is an essential read for any Yeats fan. It shows his will to believe at its most naked, before the gyres and slouching Sphinxes forged it into System. You can see Yeats mapping the wistful melancholy of his early poems onto the village folklore around his family home in Sligo--already in 1893, he's looking for a way to weld his personal interests in aestheticism and the occult to a wider national cause. You'll also find the seeds of the older proto-Fascist Yeats in his worship of lineage, parochial peasant wisdom and anti-modernism (the faery folk, along with the Great Anglo-Irish houses, have sadly for Yeats all but disappeared). The dreamy villagers he meets with turn back the clock against "that decadence we call progress" in a way that the poet at 28 already finds powerfully attractive. Most of Yeats's early poems can be linked to a vignette from "The Celtic Twilight," while recurring motifs from his later writings--beauty, passionate old age, ghosts--take on a deeper resonance after reading these lighter pieces. Yeats walks a fine line between believing in the faeries that so many of the peasants he talks to can see, and regarding them simply as "dramatizations of our moods," an example of the tragic Celtic taste for unreachable beauty that he wanted to capture in his poems. Yeats walked that line in one form or another his whole life, and I understood the poems much better after reading these sketches--for that alone, this book's worth a read.
Rating:
Summary: A SHIMMERING, MYSTICAL CLASSIC
Review: Those who love the poetry & mystery of Celtic stories, must have this book. As a Celtic witch who knows other Celtic witches, I am always dumbfounded to learn that they have read every shallow Llewellyn book on Celtic magic, but have not read Yeats. Shame! Of all the writers one could encounter, who better than a great poet to relate such magic of the fay?
In this book of many short stories, the author relates tales told to him of faeries, ghosts, and mystical creatures. It was first published in 1893, so it has the wonderful quaint quality of its age, without being dated or dry.
Find a copy of this classic, wonderful volume & experience the magic of the Celtic hedgerows, villages & faery hills of long ago....
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