Abstract
In this age of ambitious thoughts, this cosmopolitan age, when poets have ransacked the world for their themes, the author of this little volume has sung for the most part his own countryside and his seaboard towns:1
A wild west Coast, a little Town,
Where little Folk go up and down,
Tides flow and winds blow:
Night and Tempest and the Sea,
Human Will and Human Fate:
What is little, what is great?
Howsoe’er the answer be,
Let me sing of what I know.2
This letter appeared in PSJ for 2 Sep 1888 under the column heading “The Literary World. Book Reviews and News” and with the footnote “Irish Songs and Other Poems. By William Allingham. With Music. Reeves and Turner.” HR title: “The Poet of Ballyshannon.”
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Notes
Yeats was reviewing William Allingham, Irish Songs and Poems. With Nine Airs Harmonized for Voice and Pianoforte (London: Reeves and Turner, 1887). For Allingham see note 5.17, and for other essays on his work by Yeats see UP1 208–12, 258–61. See also items 5 and 6 in the present volume.
Sir Samuel Ferguson, “The Welshmen of Tirawley,” in Lays of the Western Gael and Other Poems (London: Bell and Daldy, 1865) pp. 70–88. Emon Lynott, blinded along with the other men of his clan of Welsh settlers, begets a sighted son through whom he wreaks vengeance upon the Barrett clan. Yeats reprinted the poem in BIV. Tirawley is one of the baronies of County Mayo.
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© 1989 Michael Yeats
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Yeats, W.B. (1989). The Poet of Ballyshannon. In: Bornstein, G., Witemeyer, H. (eds) Letters to the New Island. The Collected Edition of the Works of W. B. Yeats. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-09425-7_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-09425-7_15
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