1898-11-24 to William Butler Yeats

Menu of Letters 1898

Aet. 46, to an Irish poet and dramatist. Twelve copies of the trial revised edition of Evelyn Innes were printed on 28 October 1898. Yeats’s feedback on the text was reflected in this letter.

George Moore sent his next round of revisions “to the printer,” according to this letter, but the next known version of Evelyn Innes was published in 1901 (with even more changes, and without a dedication to W.B. Yeats and Arthur Symons).

Yeats’s book The Wind Among the Reeds was ’’received” by the Daily Chronicle (15 April 1899); a short, unsigned notice was published a few days later.

Yeats’s book, The Shadowy Waters, was published in 1900. He collaborated with George on the play Diarmuid and Grania (1901), with music by Edward Elgar. The play was published posthumously in 1951.

Richard Wagner was intensely political until early middle age when he pivoted to advocacy of symbolic, aesthetic revolution through myth and music.

Yeats’s political activities at this time were rooted in Irish nationalism, to which he took a generally lofty, aesthetic approach. His formation (with George and others) of an Irish Literary Theatre was indirectly political.

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