Yeats and the Beginning of the Irish Renaissance

Nicely written and thoroughly researched. . . . An excellent and much needed book. This invaluable work traces Yeast's determined efforts . . . to establish for a prophetically free Ireland of the twentieth century a high literary culture and modern Irish tradition. . . . It is fitting that Yeats himself has since emerged as the shining star in that galaxy, as poet, dramatist, and prose writer; but also, as Phillip Marcus brilliantly shows, as chief propagandist, politician, and producer of that Irish Renaissance of the title. Marcus helps us to recover the excitement and enthusiasm of W. B. Yeats and AE when they discovered ancient Irish sagas in the translations made by O'Grady and other scholars.