A Rumor of Soul: The Poetry of W.B. Yeats (Wiseblood Classics) - Softcover

Yeats, W.B.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0692500316 ISBN 13: 9780692500316

Publisher: Wiseblood Books, 2015

Synopsis

“Yeats is often cherry-picked for his swooniest love poems, but Webster reveals the deeper truth that draws us to yearn for Innisfree and wish for the cloths of heaven: in Yeats, we find a powerful and seductive conviction that the human soul exists and is immortal. This belief is by no means a given in modern society, as Webster shows by orchestrating a chord of voices, from contemporary philosophers to Arcade Fire. It is an intimidating consensus, and Yeats becomes, in Webster's telling, a rebellious voice urging the soul to "clap its hands and sing, and louder sing."

Meredith McCann / Editor-In-Chief / Dappled Things

"Jeremiah Webster stands in the great tradition of essayists who use the literary form of the introduction to cast a vision. He knows Yeats, of course. He is comfortable and familiar with Yeats as only a scholar who loves the subject can be. Loves, not simply knows. His introduction functions as a literate, insightful, and glorious appeal that soul (yes, soul!) once again inhabit the world of learning, and it does so with passion and elegance.”

Gerald Sittser / Professor of Theology / Whitworth University

Jeremiah Webster gives W.B. Yeats voice once again and in doing so finds his own prophetic and poetic voice. Webster heralds our civilization’s loss of soul and suggests the imaginative spirit of W.B. Yeats as a worthy and effective antidote for such a devastating malady. He speculates that “When a civilization denies this invisible angel, a debasement of culture and the physical body follows. Human life is reduced to behavioral instinct, naturalistic cause and effect, and when the distractions of carnival do not suffice, the gravitational pull of despair takes hold.” Such despair needs the soul-food of Yeats and Webster.

Fr. Robert Dalgleish / Advent Anglican / Bellevue, Washington

About this title

About the Author:

Jeremiah Webster earned a PhD in English from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His poetry has appeared in various journals including North American Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Crab Creek Review, The Midwest Quarterly, Floating Bridge Review, Rock and Sling, Ruminate, Dappled Things, REAL, and elsewhere. He co-edited The Spirit of Adoption (Cascade Books 2014), an anthology of adoption narratives, and provided a critical introduction for Paradise in The Waste Land (2013), also published by Wiseblood Books. He teaches literature and writing at Northwest University in Kirkland, Washington.

About this edition

• Publisher: Wiseblood Books
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0692500316
• ISBN 13: 9780692500316
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 148