Customer Reviews

The Celtic Twilight: Myth, Fantasy and Folklore

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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.

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.