Yeats: The Man and the Masks [Paperback]

Richard Ellmann (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 2000

The definitive biography of William Butler Yeats

The most influential poet of his age, Yeats eluded the grasp of many who sought to explain him. In this classic critical examination of the poet, Richard Ellmann strips away the masks of his subject: occultist, senator of the Irish Free State, libidinous old man, and Nobel Prize winner.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Richard Ellmann was Goldsmiths’ Professor at Oxford University and Woodruff Professor at Emory University. He achieved world fame for his biography of Joyce and wrote many scholarly and critical works, including two on Yeats.

Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; First Edition edition (March 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393008592
• ISBN-13: 978-0393008593
• Product Dimensions: 7.3 x 4.8 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #531,623 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #4 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > People, A-Z > ( Y ) > Yeats, William Butler

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

33 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Casting a Cold Eye, June 6, 2000

By 

A. R. Paterson (London United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Yeats: The Man and the Masks (Paperback)

THE definitive, open, and engaging study of the man T.S.Eliot declared the greatest poet of his age. Richard Ellman is no longer with us, but this is a monument of Yeats biography and criticism, the book which all subsequent biographers try to rewrite. The text itself, written as it was amidst a flurry of uncollected papers in the forties and with the co-operation of W.B.'s widow George, is understandably reticent about some elements of the poet's private life, notably his early lovers and extra-marital affairs; but the introduction printed with this new edition fills in many of the blanks, and gives the reasoning for Ellman's assertion that Yeats's affair with Maud Gonne was indeed finally consummated, confirming a suspicion hitherto based only on ambiguous references in letters and the poem 'A Man Young and Old'. Most of all, however, it is Ellman's sensitive and insightful treatment of Yeats's at once shy and self-possessed nature that impresses; the writer will never have a more accurate critic, and the man never a more sincere and biting appraisal of his contradictions. This is the place to start if you are interested in Yeats: you may not find the book or the man that you were expecting, an easy dreamy life of lost women and lake isles, but the portrait is truer, and the artistic genius more clearly delineated than in any other book on the subject, and there have been many. Ellman went on to write the definitive lives of James Joyce and Oscar Wilde; that his first essay in literary biography stands comparison with these is its own testament.

26 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Biograph Master, April 11, 2003

By 

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

This review is from: Yeats: The Man and the Masks (Paperback)

Ellmann was only 30 when he published this in 1948, less than 10 years after Yeats's death; he was the first biographer to see Yeats's papers in their chaotic entirety. What an astounding job! You'd think this would read like a warm-up for his later magisterial biographies of Joyce and Wilde, but "The Man and the Masks" holds its own against those works, giving a sensitive, economical portrait of an unusually fractured poet.

Ellmann stresses Yeats's life-long effort to forge his thoughts into a unified system in the teeth of inbred skepticism, shyness and vacillation. He draws a discreet curtain over the sexual parts of Yeats's life but compensates with a keen understanding of the courage it took for this diffident, ill-read & dreamy man to make himself by fits and starts into a modern poet. My favorite parts of the book were the sections where Ellmann compares earlier drafts of the poems to the printed versions, showing just how hard-won Yeats's genius was. He tempers a critical eye towards Yeats's excesses--the wild mysticism, the Fascist sympathies, the arrogant public demeanor--with an understanding of Yeats's deep need for masks. According to Ellmann, Yeats's theories and systems weren't dogmas so much as postures he assumed to fulfill his own desire for a certainty of belief he never quite attained. Ellmann shows how that drive shaped the poems and ultimately rescued them from the deadness certitude would have brought. A classic study and an excellent starting-point for further reading on Yeats's life and work.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Biography and Literary criticism as one, January 17, 2006

By 

Shalom Freedman "Shalom Freedman" (Jerusalem,Israel) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Yeats, the man and the masks (A Dutton everyman paperback) (Hardcover)

Ellmann was both a masterful biographer and first- rate literary critic. In this early book he writes an excellent account of the life of Yeats, and combines with an overall analysis of Yeats' literary development. He probes deeply into the symbolic and mythic meaning of Yeats' poetry and provides for the lay-reader a key to this often complex poetry's, understanding.
Ellmann would go on later to write his much larger masterpiece , the biography of Joyce- but here as a young man he shows a surprising depth of understanding of the full range of Yeats' problems through his remarkable creative, and not easy personal, life.