The Celtic Twilight: Myth, Fantasy and Folklore [Paperback]

W. B. Yeats (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1990

William Butler Yeats was a poet a mystic an initiate of the Golden Dawn-arguably the most influential esoteric order in the Western magical tradition. In he returns to his roots in Irish folklore to call up a dazzling array of sorcerers, faeries, ghosts, and nature spirits. The result is an enchanting tribute to the visionary heart of Irish folk tradition-and the memory of the poet who would not let it die.

Product Details

• Paperback: 160 pages
• Publisher: Prism Pr Ltd (September 1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1853270296
• ISBN-13: 978-1853270291
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.2 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,393,178 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Dream Time, April 4, 2003

By 

Arch Llewellyn "arch-l" - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Celtic Twilight: Myth, Fantasy and Folklore (Paperback)

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.

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars I was disappointed, February 28, 2009

By 

Cwn_Annwn (Copenhagen, Denmark) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Celtic Twilight: Myth, Fantasy and Folklore (Paperback)

Yeats compiled these stories from various Irish hillbillies in the 1890s. I am a lover of all things Celtic as well as a lover of folklore, local legends, ghost stories, faerie lore, etc, but surprisingly I just didn't get sucked into this book like I thought I would.