Penetrating beyond preconceptions about Maud proved to be demanding. The result is a compelling study of a woman who for too long has been perceived as otherworldly, despite the fact that she had dedicated her life to Ireland’s revolutionary struggle. In fact, she embraces it in a succinct but richly detailed critical biography of one of Ireland’s most celebrated and enigmatic political and cultural figures. In her first book, T he Fascination of What’s Difficult: A Life of Maud Gonne, Kim Bendheim does not shy away from complication. Complex figures are flattened, stripped of their vital humanity. The authorized version inevitably obscures the preceding chaos, tangled fallout, and intricacies of Ireland’s political transformation. The chronicle of how an oppressed colony becomes an independent nation-state is a sympathetic saga, its venerable underdogs practically canonized. The air-brushing is a by-product of the nationalist meat-grinder. Difficult parts of the past are often swept under the rug so the “official” story can be marketed. There is a tendency in popular Irish historicism to favor the myth. The Fascination of What’s Difficult: A Life of Maud Gonne by Kim Bendheim. Categories: William Butler Yeats Tags: 1865, 1939, Anthony Domestico, Biography, W.B.“What happens when you discover your heroine was a vile anti-Semite?” Yeats died in Menton, France in 1939, the most celebrated Irish poet of the century and one of modernism’s most complex creators of verse and drama. After briefly flirting with the Irish Blueshirts, an Irish Fascist political party, Yeats supported the Free State and distanced himself from Fascism in its German and Italian incarnations. His last years saw the publication of many of his strongest works, including “Among School Children” in 1928 and “The Circus Animal’s Desertion” in 1939. Yeats’s poetry continued to evolve as he aged. Yeats continued to be interested in Irish national politics even after the country gained independence from England: he was appointed to the Irish Senate in 1922. Yeats’s poetic output throughout the years was extremely varied, from the nostalgia-drenched Irish imagery of “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” to the 1892 dram a The Countess Cathleen, from the abstruse symbology of the 1925 A Vision to the political nature of poems like “Easter 1916.” His poetry often dealt with the relation between artifice and truth, between poetic creation and natural beauty. It helped put Irish drama at the forefront of world theater, staging the premieres of plays like Yeats’s own On Baile’s Strand and Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars. In 1899, Yeats helped found the Irish Literary Theatre, which become the Abbey Theatre in 1904 and served as the main source for the renaissance of Irish drama in the early years of the 20th century. Yeats met Lady Augusta Gregory in 1894, a friendship that proved essential for the Irish Literary Revival. In this same year, Yeats met Maud Gonne, a beauty with nationalist sympathies Yeats’s unrequited love affair with Gonne lasted decades, and she served as the impetus for much of his lyric poetry. His first volume of verse, The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems, appeared in 1889. Here he met George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, and other poets and artists. After attending the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin from 1884 to 1886, Yeats moved to London with his family. His father, originally a lawyer, quit his career in the law to become an artist, a career that Yeats’s brother Jack would follow. William Butler Yeats was born on Jin the village of Sandymount in County Dublin, Ireland. He was a complex amalgam of influences and interests, deeply engaged with the political issues of Home Rule yet equally fascinated by esoteric spiritualism, using some of the most traditional poetic forms available yet using them in ways that revealed their flexibility and capacity to accommodate changing and at times violent conditions. Yeats (1865-1939) is the figure most associated with the Irish Literary Revival of the early 20th century his poetry, prose, and drama helped earn him the 1923 Nobel Prize in Literature.
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