Download or read book Imagining Ireland in the Poems and Plays of W. B. Yeats written by Anthony Bradley and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 2011-05-15 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An essential part of the Irish national imaginary, the poems and plays of W. B. Yeats have helped to create the nation of Ireland, while critiquing the modern state that emerged from the country’s revolutionary period. Yeats’s mastery and extension of the traditional forms of verse, from ballad and sonnet to modernist sequence or constellation, gives aesthetic shape to Irish political and cultural preoccupations. This study offers a lucid and comprehensive account of Yeats’s poetry and drama that makes illuminating connections with contemporary theories of nationalism and modernism.