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Sat 09 Sep 2010Splendid, subtle and stimulating
LITERARY CRITICISM:Yeats & Violence, By Michael Wood, Oxford, 272pp. £18.99
FIRST, A CAVEAT. Readers expecting this book to be exclusively a politico-literary study of the Yeats who worried that a play of his might have sent out certain men the British shot in 1916, and who in the 1930s had a brief infatuation with Irish fascism, and whose intensifying preoccupation with what is called, with typical Irish delicacy, the physical force tradition, might link him to our very own Thirty Years War in Northern Ireland, will be disappointed. Michael Wood’s concerns stretch far beyond what Joyce in Finnegans Wakecalls “Irrland’s split little pea”.
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