The Edinburgh Companion to W. B. Yeats and the Arts

The first book to comprehensively address W.B. Yeats’s engagements across the arts as both writer and cultural worker Includes detailed case studies which capture the complex history of Yeats as an inter-arts thinker and collaborator Presents a wide variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches, including from scholars of literature, aesthetics, drama, music, dance and the visual arts, as well as perspectives drawn from Victorian, Fin de siècle and Modernist studies Offers the latest critical thinking on the intersections between Yeats’s interest in the arts, his role as an active public figure and the socio-political and ideological nature of his writings Features new work exploring many arts in combination, as well as focused, fully illustrated analyses of individual arts to appeal to a wide variety of readers and practitioners W. B. Yeats was not only a poet but also a cultural revolutionary. A compulsive, restless collaborator, he fostered numerous artistic enterprises, from the Abbey Theatre to the Cuala Press, and pursued a variety of inter-artistic spaces and media. From childhood co-creations with his siblings to the arresting combinations of sound and movement in his late drama, his work repeatedly addresses and incorporates music, dance, and the visual, material and theatrical arts with remarkable intensity. For him, literature was a vital thing that in one form or another engaged all the senses. This volume’s newly commissioned chapters analyse afresh such engagements. Bringing together scholars of literature, aesthetics and cultural history with specialists in drama, music, dance and the visual arts, they provide an exciting range of historical, conceptual and disciplinary perspectives.