John Butler Yeats

Douglas N. Archibald

1974
99 pages
ISBN 0-8387-7759-7
Irish Writers Series

John Butler Yeats is another outstanding contribution to the Irish Writers Series. These monographs have been designed to treat in individual volumes the significant Anglo-Irish writers of the 19th and 20th centuries. These studies will prove helpful to literary scholars and to students of literature. When complete the series will constitute a significant history of modern Anglo-Irish literature, encompass discussions of more than 50 writers.

John Butler Yeats (1839-1922) is chiefly remembered as the father of genius; his son William was Ireland's leading modern poet and his son Jack its most famous modern painter. But he was himself a gifted conversationalist, a talented painter, and the author of essays, reviews, poems, a fragment of an autobiography, and hundreds of letters to family and friends in Ireland, England, and America. He was also a presence and a force in many significant lives-John Synge, George Russell (AE), Susan Mitchell, York Powell, Exra Pound, John Sloan, Van Wyck Brooks, John Quinn, and others.

Much of John Butler Yeats's writing is unpublished, uncollected, out of print, or difficult to come by. The welcome summaries here given capture the gaiety and pride of this lover of the Irish home along with the flavor and quality of his mind.

About the author:

Douglas N. Archibald has taught at the University of Michigan, where he did his doctoral study; Cornell University, where he was also Assistant Dean of the college of Arts and Sciences; and at Colby College, where he is Chairman of the Department of English. He has written about Irish and English history, politics, and literature, about problems of intellectual history and literary influence, and is at work on books about W. B. Years and Edmund Burke.