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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Reveries over Childhood and Youth," W. B. Yeats intricately weaves a tapestry of autobiographical reflections that explore the formative experiences of his early life. Written in a lyrical and introspective style, this collection transcends mere memoir, delving into the themes of memory, identity, and the passage of time. Set against the backdrop of late 19th-century Ireland, Yeats captures the essence of a nation grappling with its cultural heritage, all while examining the interplay between childhood innocence and the complexities of adult perception. W. B. Yeats, a pivotal figure in the Irish Literary Revival, drew inspiration from both personal and national narratives, which is particularly evident in this work. His lifelong fascination with mythology and folklore is mirrored in the vivid imagery and emotive language throughout these reveries. The author's own tumultuous relationship with his past and the socio-political dynamics of his time contribute to a profound exploration of self, making this work a vital piece in understanding Yeats' broader oeuvre as well as the cultural zeitgeist of his era. "Reveries over Childhood and Youth" is a recommended read for anyone interested in the psychological landscapes of formative years and the intricate relationship between memory and identity. Yeats' unique blend of poetic language and candid reflection not only resonates with personal readers but also invites scholars to reconsider the role of individual experience within the context of a nation's evolving narrative. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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Reveries over Childhood and Youth
Table of Contents
Introduction
A boy watches the light on western waters and learns that memory, once shaped by art, can become a country one may revisit to understand the self that is always in the making.
Reveries over Childhood and Youth is W. B. Yeats’s lyrical account of the early formations of his mind and art, a memoir that seeks the origin of a voice rather than the chronology of a life. Written in the early twentieth century, it turns childhood landscapes and youthful encounters into symbols that reveal an inner history. Yeats, the Irish poet and dramatist who would later receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, uses this book to trace how place, family, and imagination begin to cohere into vocation. The result is a meditation on beginnings that feels simultaneously intimate and ceremonious.
Its classic status rests on the way it transformed autobiography into a poetic mode, marrying modern self-scrutiny to the resonant cadence of myth and folklore. Yeats does not catalogue events so much as orchestrate motifs, showing how the ordinary becomes emblematic when filtered through memory. The book helped set a standard for literary memoir that privileges pattern over plot, atmosphere over anecdote. It also bridges traditions, refining late Romantic sensibility into an early modernist introspection. In doing so, it has shaped how writers imagine the artist’s origin story, placing reverie at the center of creative identity.
Composed during the 1910s, when Yeats had secured his reputation as a leading figure of the Irish Literary Revival, the book belongs to the first movement of his prose autobiography later gathered under the title Autobiographies. It introduces the sources of his art without rehearsing his public triumphs, keeping the focus on inward apprenticeship. Yeats aims to record a life as a pattern of images whose recurrence discloses meaning, a method consistent with his poetic practice. He writes as a maker and as a witness to making, turning recollection into craft while refusing the exhaustive inventory of conventional memoir.
The narrative unfolds in a sequence of vignettes, each felt rather than argued, a mosaic in which sea, weather, books, and household talk acquire the pressure of destiny. The prose carries the musicality of Yeats’s verse, yet speaks with a measured calm, allowing detail to accumulate into atmosphere. We are shown the textures of an artistic upbringing and the mental habits of a child attentive to stories and signs. The result is a landscape of mind where inner and outer worlds touch, and where the reader is invited to experience discovery rather than receive explanation.
For readers interested in Irish cultural history, the book illuminates the intimate roots of a writer who helped shape a national literature. Yeats recalls the formative pull of Irish places and traditions without polemic, letting local speech, custom, and legend cast their quiet spells. In this way, the memoir aligns personal memory with a broader cultural inheritance. It reveals how a modern artist could draw sustenance from ancestral forms while seeking new modes of expression, and it does so without turning the private record into a public manifesto or a historical ledger.
At the book’s heart lies an inquiry into how imagination takes hold. Yeats describes the slow gathering of images, the apprenticeship of attention, and the early recognition that art is a discipline as much as an impulse. Childhood is not presented as a golden age but as a workshop where tastes, fears, and fascinations are tempered. The memoir becomes a laboratory of sensibility, showing how passions for story, landscape, and tradition coalesce into a deliberate way of seeing. By tracing these first stirrings, Yeats offers a map of artistic formation that continues to guide readers of every calling.
As a touchstone of the literary memoir, Reveries over Childhood and Youth has influenced later approaches to life writing that prize voice, pattern, and atmosphere over linear completeness. Its example can be felt wherever writers seek to render the interior weather of becoming rather than merely report external milestones. Yeats demonstrates that autobiography can be a mode of artistry equal to poetry or drama, with its own rhythms and symbols. This expansion of the genre’s possibilities helped legitimize a more exploratory, meditative memoir, one capable of honoring uncertainty while still achieving coherence and form.
The book’s voice is notable for its tact and candor, a balance that gives the narrative its enduring poise. Yeats acknowledges the partiality of memory and the necessity of selection, shaping a portrait that is truthful because it is consciously made. He shows how self-knowledge arrives through arrangement, not confession alone. The memoir’s ethical stance—neither evasive nor exhibitionist—models a way of writing the self that respects both privacy and art. In this measured self-portrait, readers encounter a humility before experience and a confidence in craft that together sustain the work’s authority.
Reading Yeats’s reveries is less like following a plotted journey than entering a gallery of moments where attention has been burnished to a sheen. The pacing is unhurried, the transitions intuitive, the revelations arriving obliquely through image and cadence. This approach invites rereading, because the book’s meanings depend on the interplay of motifs rather than on surprise. It suits readers who enjoy prose that thinks in pictures and feels its way toward statement. Above all, it offers the pleasure of companionship with a mind discovering itself, allowing the present to breathe inside the past.
Contemporary audiences will find in these pages a model for thinking about how identity is made from place, tradition, and chosen work. In a culture that prizes immediacy, Yeats’s patience with memory and form offers a counterexample of sustained attention. The book speaks to debates about authenticity by showing that artifice, rightly understood, is a path to truth. It speaks to questions of heritage by revealing how local belonging can foster a modern imagination. And it speaks to artists of every kind by demonstrating how discipline transforms the raw material of life into durable meaning.
Reveries over Childhood and Youth endures because it converts private recollection into a shared resource, inviting readers to feel how memory becomes art and how art refines a life. Written by W. B. Yeats in the early twentieth century, it stands at a crucial crossroad between tradition and modernity, between national revival and personal vocation. Its themes—formation, inheritance, imagination, and the ethics of self-portraiture—remain vital. As a classic, it continues to teach attentiveness, restraint, and the courage to shape experience. For that reason, it remains a quietly exhilarating book, as revealing today as when it first appeared.
Synopsis
Reveries over Childhood and Youth is W. B. Yeats's autobiographical account of his earliest years, composed in a reflective, episodic style. The book traces the formation of his imagination from birth through the threshold of his adult career. Rather than a strict chronology, Yeats arranges scenes and portraits that emphasize influences, places, and conversations. He presents family life, schooling, first artistic ambitions, and the emergence of interests in folklore, nationalism, and mysticism. The narrative offers concise vignettes that explain how environment and temperament guided his choices. It serves as an introduction to the later autobiographical volumes, establishing the personal and cultural ground of his work.
Yeats begins with family background in Dublin and Sligo. He recalls his father, John Butler Yeats, a portrait painter whose searching talk and skepticism shaped household debates, and his mother's Sligo kin, the merchant Pollexfens, whose coastal world supplied durable images. The memoir notes frequent moves between Ireland and England, reflecting precarious finances and artistic pursuits. Domestic scenes include siblings who would also become artists, and a home animated by books, pictures, and argument. These early pages describe the mixture of affection, anxiety, and aspiration that framed his childhood, setting the pattern of alternating stability with disruption that later fed his artistic temperament.
In Sligo, Yeats situates the core of his imaginative life. He evokes sea light, mountains, lanes, and harbor, as well as farm kitchens and servants' stories. Folklore, fairy belief, and local superstitions appear not as curiosities but as living habit, giving him symbols and tonalities for later poems and plays. He emphasizes names of places, family houses, and habitual walks to convey the constancy of landscape. The narrative balances concrete recollection with the suggestiveness of rumor and legend, presenting Sligo as a repository of memory. These chapters establish the enduring link between natural scenery, oral tradition, and the rhythms of his thought.
Moving between Dublin and London, Yeats describes unsteady schooling and the education he received at home. The schoolroom often left him uncertain, yet his father's studio and talk supplied rigorous training in observation, criticism, and taste. He recalls evenings of argument among painters, writers, and visitors, where style and conviction were tested by conversation. He learned to distrust received opinions while seeking personal standards. The portrait of John Butler Yeats is central: affectionate yet demanding, skeptical yet generous with time. Through these encounters, the young poet gained a method of thinking in images and analogies, which complemented and sometimes replaced formal lessons.
Early reading occupies a significant portion of the memoir. Yeats recounts how romantic poets, Blake above all, and books of legend and history impressed themselves upon him. He tells of discovering Irish heroic narratives through modern retellings and scholarship that made antiquity feel immediate. Alongside literature, he records a growing curiosity about spiritualism, theosophy, and magical speculation, finding in them a language for intuition and pattern. Accounts of dreams, signs, and experiments are presented as parts of a disciplined search rather than mere anecdote. This blend of study and speculation formed a framework through which he organized experience and artistic aims.
With adolescence, Yeats enters art training and meets companions who will matter to his development. He attends the Dublin art school, practices drawing, and measures his abilities against peers. He portrays friendships, including those with fellow students who shared mystical or literary interests, and he describes early attempts at verse and drama. Gradually, he concludes that painting does not match his deepest gifts. The memoir outlines the shift from visual to verbal art, noting how technique, patience, and the father's criticism carried over into poetry. It marks the first small publications, rehearsing the incremental steps from exercise to an emerging vocation.
The narrative turns to Dublin literary society and nationalist circles, where Yeats meets figures who sharpen his purpose. Encounters with older patriots and scholars, notably John O'Leary, connect art to civic memory and cultural revival. He begins collecting folktales, studying Irish speech, and shaping a program for modern literature rooted in native tradition. Essays, reviews, and poems appear in periodicals, and discussions about language, theater, and myth suggest future collaborations. These sections stress formation rather than achievement, showing how guidance and example supplied a scale of values. The emphasis falls on preparation, reading, and conversation as foundations for public work.
Periods in London reappear, set against the demands of earning a living and gaining an audience. Yeats depicts modest rooms, long talks, and cautious introductions to editors and patrons. He refines manuscripts, stages readings, and learns the practicalities of publication. The book records the appearance of early volumes and plays, treating them as milestones rather than occasions for judgment. Circles of contemporaries provide stimulus and friction; occult study continues alongside literary networking. Movement between England and Ireland becomes habitual, enabling him to test ideas against different publics. By the end, a clear professional identity has formed from scattered endeavors.
Closing chapters gather the threads of family influence, Sligo memory, disputatious training, mythic reading, and esoteric inquiry. Yeats presents a coherent arc from wandering student to deliberate maker, without claiming finality. The emphasis rests on how place, conversation, and tradition shaped an artistic conscience committed to renewing Irish literature while remaining open to wider currents. Reveries over Childhood and Youth thus serves as both portrait and preface: a record of influences that explains his early choices and announces the direction of later work. The book ends poised before larger public enterprises, inviting continuation in subsequent autobiographical writings.
Historical Context
Reveries over Childhood and Youth recalls W. B. Yeats’s formative years from his birth in 1865 through the later 1880s, a period shaped by British rule in Ireland, rapid social change, and the friction between rural tradition and urban modernity. The settings shift among County Sligo on Ireland’s northwest coast, Dublin, and London. Sligo’s maritime town life, Protestant mercantile households, and surrounding tenant farms provided Yeats with a layered social landscape. Dublin embodied administrative power and poverty. London exposed him to imperial cosmopolitanism and Irish diaspora politics. The memoir’s recollections emerge against this triad of places, each marked by differing laws, classes, and confessional identities.
Sligo’s geography—its Atlantic port, Rosses Point, and the Ox Mountains—organized local commerce and folklore that Yeats absorbed from servants and sailors in the Pollexfen family circle. Dublin’s schools and civic spaces offered him institutional routines and glimpses of bureaucratic authority. London’s suburbs and galleries framed his father’s precarious art career and a bohemian household economy. The era’s technologies—railways, steamships, mass newspapers, and the telegraph—knit these places together while sharpening contrasts between provincial custom and metropolitan life. Though published in 1914, the book’s vantage is rooted in the late Victorian decades when Yeats’s sense of Ireland’s history, class relations, and political agitation took shape.
The aftermath of the Great Famine (1845–1852) defined rural Ireland into Yeats’s childhood. County Sligo’s population fell from about 180,886 (1841) to roughly 101,573 (1871), with continued decline by 1891, mirroring mass emigration to Britain and North America. Poor relief, remittance culture, and deep memory of hunger shaped tenant attitudes toward landlords and authority. In Yeats’s memoir, the melancholy of deserted cabins, emigration stories, and the elderly’s recollections infuse the Sligo scenes. He hears famine-shadowed lore and senses an inherited caution toward risk and debt, elements that color his understanding of rural reticence, fatalism, and the intense value placed on land security.
The Irish Church Act (1869), effective 1871, disestablished the Church of Ireland, ending its status as the state church and reforming tithes and property. This diminished the institutional dominance of the Protestant Ascendancy while leaving complex social hierarchies intact. For Protestant professional and mercantile families like the Yeatses and Pollexfens, it signaled a recalibrated social order in which authority seemed less assured. In Reveries, Yeats’s self-positioning within a Protestant but culturally hybrid milieu reflects this shifting ground. The memoir’s attention to household pride, anxiety, and difference from Catholic neighbors arises in part from the post-disestablishment negotiation of identity and status.
Fenianism, organized through the Irish Republican Brotherhood (founded 1858), culminated in the failed Rising of 1867 and notorious episodes such as the Manchester rescue and executions (November 1867) and Clerkenwell explosion (December 1867). These events seeded a later generation of militant nationalism and police surveillance. Yeats was a toddler when his family moved to London in 1867, but Fenian talk persisted in households and newspapers he later frequented. In the memoir’s recollections of whispered political conversations and caution around public talk, one hears the echo of Fenian legacies—underground networks, informers, and the feeling that Irish political life occurred as much in rumor as in open forums.
The Land War (1879–1882) erupted as falling agricultural prices and poor harvests intensified long-standing tenant grievances. Michael Davitt founded the Irish National Land League in Dublin on 21 October 1879, with Charles Stewart Parnell as president. Tactics included rent strikes, mass meetings, and ostracism, with the celebrated 1880 case of Captain Charles Boycott in County Mayo entering the lexicon. Rural tension produced evictions, boycotts, and periodic violence. Yeats’s Sligo summers placed him close to this agitation: he observed farmers’ guarded manners and the moral absolutism surrounding land claims. Reveries transmits that atmosphere, detailing a youth spent amid talk of rents, notices, and uneasy churchyard diplomacy.
Legislation and repression accompanied the Land War. The Land Law (Ireland) Act 1881 established the “Three Fs” (fair rent, fixity of tenure, free sale) via a new Land Commission, while Coercion Acts permitted detention without trial. The 1882 “Kilmainham Treaty” eased tensions but left scars in rural communities. In Sligo and neighboring counties, Land League branches contested rents and evictions; newspapers broadcast cases as exemplars of justice or disorder. Yeats’s memoir registers these pressures indirectly: his portraits of stewards, shopkeepers, and sailors show how agrarian conflict rippled through credit, wages, and reputation. Household caution about speech and association reflects the legal and social risks of the period.
