Eminent Domain: Yeats Among Wilde, Joyce, Pound, Eliot and Auden

Ellmann, Richard

Published by Oxford University Press, 1967

About this Item

New York. 1967. Oxford University Press. 1st American Edition. Previous Owner's Name Penned in Front, Otherwise Very Good in Worn Dustjacket. 161 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Muriel Nasser. keywords: Literary Criticism William Butler Yeats Literature. DESCRIPTION - Creative talent is rapacious, and to speak of writers as influencing each other is to make tender what is often harshly acquisitive. Writers do not flow into each other like waves, but expropriate, by the force of youth, or of age, what they require. They do not borrow, they override, exercising the right of eminent domain. Like rival sovereignties, Yeats and the five writers here balanced with him - Wilde, Joyce, Pound, Eliot, Auden - take each other into account. The initiatory occasions may be as casual as Wilde's Christmas dinner in 1888, when Yeats consumed not only his portion of the turkey but all Wilde's esthetic system, or as Eliot's boredom at Yeats's discussion of spooks in 1914; or they may be as portentous as Joyce's calling Yeats, in 1902, too old, or as Yeats's request that Pound assist in revising his poems in 1912, or as Auden's impertinent invasion' of The Tower' in 1928. Whatever the impulsion, a series of encompassments can be delimited. In the course of grand, authoritative seizures, modern poetry is fomented and written. Richard Ellmann, whose writings on modern literature have won considerable attention, exhibits here the complicated attitudes of great contemporaries toward each other's existence. Because Yeats attained pre-eminence so early, and kept it for so long, he was the focal center for both disciples and rebels. In their different ways all the writers respond to him and he in turn responds to them. Among many books on recent writing, this is the first to display the complicated interactions among these principal figures. It offers a series of sharp, unexpected pictures of their personal meetings as well as their professional impingements. The great switch from the idiom of the 1890's to the idioms of the present time is expertly displayed. inventory #23255 Previous Owner's Name Penned in Front, Otherwise Very Good in Worn Dustjacket.

Seller Inventory # z23255

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Eminent Domain: Yeats Among Wilde, Joyce, Pound, Eliot and Auden
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication Date: 1967
• Binding: hardcover
• Edition: First Edition.
• Dust Jacket Condition: Poor