Peter Alderson Smith, W. B. Yeats and the Tribes of Danu

Abstract

W. B. Yeats and the Tribes of Danu gives the reader a thorough background in the lore of the supernatural people of Irish myth, legend and folklore. It discusses Yeats’s creative use of this material in his early poetry, demonstrating that Yeats’s work “has very deep roots in tradition and is yet intensely personal” (p. 19). The book is in three parts. Part I describes the Tuatha Dé Danaan, the most prominent supernatural race of early Irish mythology; part II examines the fairy faith of modern Irish folklore. Part III traces Yeats’s growing involvement with fairyland and the fairies in The Countess Cathleen, “The Rose”, “Stories of Red Hanrahan”, and The Wind Among the Reeds, and his unsuccessful struggle between two conceptions of the Otherworld (as fairyland and as the land of death) in The Shadowy Waters, and finally interprets selected poems from In the Seven Woods and Responsibilities, including “The Two Kings”, as showing a gradual decision to abandon fairyland and the escapism it supposedly entails.