Abstract
Even without further corroboration, the unsigned review of Charles Leland’s Gypsy Sorcery and Fortune Telling, which appeared in the National Observer on 18 April 1891, might confidently be ascribed to Yeats. Through his friendship with W. E. Henley, the editor, he was a regular contributor to the magazine and since Henley knew that folklore and magic held a particular fascination for him, he would have been the natural choice to review a book of this kind. Moreover, the references to, among others, “the Rosicrucian Fratres of Germany,” and “the great shoemaker” of Altseidenberg pick up Yeats’s recent association with the Golden Dawn and the study of Boehme he had just undertaken in connection with his work on William Blake. The anti-rationalist and anti-modernist slant of the argument, as well as certain turns of phrase, would also argue strongly for his authorship.
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Notes
The Breitmann Ballads, by C. G. Leland (London, 1871).
This anecdote was related by Samuel Taylor Coleridge on 8 August 1811 at Charles Lamb’s house and is recounted in Henry Crabb Robinson’s Diary. See Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson, edited by Thomas Sadler (London, 1872), vol 1, 177–8. Robinson recalls that Hazlitt had painted a portrait of Hartley Coleridge.
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© 1985 Warwick Gould
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Kelly, J.S., Leland, C.G. (1985). Yeatsian Magic and Rational Magic: an Uncollected Review of W. B. Yeats. In: Gould, W. (eds) Yeats Annual No. 3. Yeats Annual. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-06206-5_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-06206-5_14
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