Beschreibung:

YEATS, William Butler (1865-1939). Autograph letter signed to T.E. Mayne, 18 Woburn Buildings, London, 1 December 1897, 7 pages, 8vo , on a bifolium, with envelope. Observations on the writing of 'Celtic poetry'. Yeats comments in detail and positively on a collection of poems sent to him by Mayne: 'a line like 'Asleep on the flowers the white hours lie' is not observation but creation a much better thing', criticising the influence of Tennyson on Mayne's work, and recommending, 'if one wishes to write Celtic poetry', the works of William Allingham, Douglas Hyde's Love Songs of Connacht and Sir Samuel Ferguson 'at his best', as well as 'the great English poets of the past, the Elizabethans constantly'; from English poets of the present one only picks up the temporary, from poets of the past, the eternal, 'because the rest has become a bore'; recommending too 'the great primitive writers of any country', instancing folk poetry of Romania, Finland, Zeeland and Wales, in order to 'combine a music which we can only learn from English writers, for we write in English, with a substance much wilder, much more primitive', endorsing the work of 'Miss Hughes and Miss MacLeod [William Sharp] ... The deliberate self-poseur spirit [ sic ] of Tennyson is I think very alien to our spirit'. Yeats ends by criticising the length of some of Mayne's poems, and recommending 'narrow limits ... A single perfect stanza should & must take a great deal of time'. Yeats's interest in the Irish literary revival and 'Celtic' poetry dominated his work in the 1890s. The title of his The Celtic Twilight , a collection of short stories illustrating the mystical aspect of the Irish character, became a generic phrase for the movement.