Yeats Brothers and Modernism's Love of Motion

“There are dozens of books on W. B. Yeats, and some on his brother Jack, but no one has put the two together before. Calvin Bedient does so very adroitly, without conflating their respective achievements. Bedient argues brilliantly that these two very different artists reveal a meaningful shortcoming in our customary understanding of modernism; by showing that both were fascinated by movement, or mobility—the diverse processes of change—Bedient pulls the poet toward the painter to show these two artists in sympathy with the thought of their time. An important revisionary argument about the meaning of modernism, Bedient’s work also exhibits a lively, candid critic explaining the work of the Yeats brothers in readings that constantly repay attention. No one could have a better companion while reading W. B. Yeats’ poems, or viewing Jack Yeats’ paintings.” —Robert von Hallberg, University of Chicago

“Welcome to the ‘terrible novelty of light.’ Fearless, virtuosic, turbulence-charged, The Yeats Brothers and Modernism's Love of Motion is a ravishing triumph. Plunging with nonetheless meticulous yet rippling (and yes, muscled) analytic brilliance and sensuousness through the poems and paintings of W.B. and Jack Yeats, Bedient gives us one of the most profound, emulatively thrilling, stylish, and wide-awake celebrations of poetry, of painting, and of Modernism itself, one could hope to read. No one has better caught—or rather transmitted—so much of the towering and torrential genius of the Yeats brothers, seen here in a rushing storm of cultural, political, aesthetic, and daemonic forces. The unstaunched motive, and emotive, force of Bedient's book takes us directly into the tragic yet joyful—indeed exultant—leap of poem after poem, canvas after canvas, all of them luminous, endlessly reconstitutive and volatile elements of what remains, in these gorgeous pages, the ‘bursting dawn’ of their Movement, still redolent as it is with the ‘storm-scattered intricacy’ of night.” —Peter Sacks, Harvard University

“If one is of the mind that W.B. Yeats is a bit overrated as a poet and that his brother, Jack B. Yeats, underrated as a painter, this book is a must. . . . The real value of this book is Bedient's spirited description of Jack’s thickly impastoed oils, depicting rural Irish life in garish colors wherein figuration melts into an expressionist background. These are given very game and energetic paraphrases by Bedient . . . written with a conviction reminiscent of William H. Gass. . . [a] charming study.” —Publishers Weekly

". . . in the U.S. Jack Yeats has not yet attained anything like the degree of canonisation he reached in Ireland at least a generation ago, if not two generations. . . . Bedient, however, has an almost messianic urge to place him firmly at the heart of modernism, along with his poet-brother, and he is surely right in this . . . the sheer verve and unorthodoxy this book displays in tackling its highly dualistic subject deserve full respect." —The Irish Times

"Bedient takes a unique approach to two members of one of the most fascinating and artistically accomplished families of the 20th century—the Yeats brothers, William Butler and Jack Butler. Although one can find scores of books on W. B. Yeats and a handful about Jack B. Yeats, no one before Bedient has sought to analyze simultaneously the achievements of each. . . . This book makes a major contribution to contemporary Irish scholarship." —Choice

"It is appropriate . . . that Bedient, with his eye for the visually and characterologically distinctive, should have devoted half of his study to the painter Jack Yeats, the poet's brother. This pairing is meant to illuminate the relationship of the two artists and brothers and to correct the comparative neglect into which the work of the latter Yeats has fallen . . . Bedient's thesis of intertwining, coeval, and yet divergent modernisms is handily exemplified . . . by a comparison between the Yeats brothers." —Boston Review

“William Butler Yeats and his brother, Jack Butler Yeats, were not particularly close. However, each in his own way exemplified Irish modernism. In this poetic analysis of the poems of the former and the paintings of the latter, Bedient argues that the themes of motion and impermanence flow through their work.” —Reference and Research Book News

“Calvin Bedient, in The Yeats Brothers and Modernism’s Love of Motion (a fine book on William Butler and his brother Jack, the Modernist painter), highlights the poet’s ‘taste for chaos, for prodigality, for violence,’ though ‘hotly contested by his love of the courtly.’” —The Nation

“Jack Butler Yeats has been ‘absurdly eclipsed’ by his more famous brother, William Butler . . . . A joint reappraisal of the two brothers’ artistic outputs along more detailed, objective lines promises to rebalance the scales.” —The Oxonian Review

“A study of Jack and W. B. Yeats that examines the preoccupation of both painter and poet with motion and fluidity.” —The Chronicle Review