The definitive biography of William Butler Yeats The most influential poet of his age, Yeats eluded the grasp of many who sought to explain him. In this classic critical examination of the poet, Richard Ellmann strips away the masks of his subject: occultist, senator of the Irish Free State, libidinous old man, and Nobel Prize winner.

Yeats (Modern masters)

DONOGHUE, Denis

Literature & Fiction

Fontana

The author was brought up in Warrenpoint and in this book describes his family life and the characters involved including his frail delicate mother, his brother who died of pneumonia at 14 months, and above all his father, a proud, resolute policeman with the RUC. In a house where "religion was practised but never discussed" he wrestled with the ideas of Augustine and Rousseau, and developed a passion for music and literature, bringing to bear on Yeats and Eliot, Keats and Synge the same fortitude he saw and loved in his father.

Warrenpoint

London: Jonathan Cape

Connoisseurs of Chaos: Ideas of Order in Modern American Poetry

Poetry

Columbia Univ. Pr.

Connoisseurs of Chaos [Paperback] [Oct 15, 1984]

Connoisseurs of Chaos

History & Criticism

Columbia University Press

A collection of essays explores the richness and variety of the English language and some unusual words and examines the two opposing schools of modern literary criticism, the "Graphireader" and "Epireader"

Ferocious Alphabets

In the spring of 1999 distinguished literary critic Denis Donoghue inaugurated the Erasmus Lectures at the University of Notre Dame under the title ADAM'S CURSE. This book is the text of those lectures, revised and extended. W. B. Yeats's poem "Adam's Curse" provides Donoghue with motif and incentive. In Genesis God says to Adam: "Because thou hast harkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life."  Yeats put it this way: "It is certain there is no fine thing  /  Since Adam's curse but needs much labouring."  Based on a conversation he had with his beloved Maud Gonne and her sister Kathleen, Yeats's poem thinks about how difficult it is to be beautiful, to write great poetry, to love.  In his Erasmus Lectures, Donoghue thinks about the lasting difficulties involved in understanding, and living with, cultural, literary, and religious values that are in restless relation to one another. On these and related matters, Donoghue enters into conversation with a variety of writers, some of them—John Crowe Ransom, Hans Urs von Balthasar, William Lynch, Alasdair MacIntyre, Emmanuel Levinas, Andrew Delbanco, and Robert Bellah—signaled by the titles of the seven lectures.  Into the thematic space suggested by each of these titles Donoghue invites other writers and sages to join the conversation—Henry Adams, William Empson, John Milbank, Czeslaw Milosz, Seamus Heaney, Gabriel Josipovici, and many more. The "talk," as you might expect, keeps coming around to the reading of specific literary texts: passages from Paradise Lost, Stevens's "Esthétique du mal," fiction by Gide and J. F. Powers and J. M. Coetzee, to name only a few. In ADAM'S CURSE, Donoghue brings his special intelligence to bear on some of the intersections where religion and literature provocatively meet.

Adam's Curse: Reflections on Religion and Literature (Erasmus Institute Books)

United States

University of Notre Dame Press

W. B. Yeats's poem "Adam's Curse" provides Donoghue with motif and incentive. In Genesis God says to Adam: "Because thou hast harkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life." Yeats put it this way: "It is certain there is no fine thing / Since Adam's curse but needs much labouring." Based on a conversation he had with his beloved Maud Gonne and her sister Kathleen, Yeats's poem thinks about how difficult it is to be beautiful, to write great poetry, to love. In his Erasmus Lectures, Donoghue thinks about the lasting difficulties involved in understanding, and living with, cultural, literary, and religious values that are in restless relation to one another. On these and related matters, Donoghue enters into conversation with a variety of writers, some of them-John Crowe Ransom, Hans Urs von Balthasar, William Lynch, Alasdair MacIntyre, Emmanuel Levinas, Andrew Delbanco, and Robert Bellah-signaled by the titles of the seven lectures. Into the thematic space suggested by each of these titles Donoghue invites other writers and sages to join the conversation-Henry Adams, William Empson, John Milbank, Czeslaw Milosz, Seamus Heaney, Gabriel Josipovici, and many more. The "talk," as you might expect, keeps coming around to the reading of specific literary texts: passages from Paradise Lost, Stevens's "Esthétique du mal," fiction by Gide and J. F. Powers and J. M. Coetzee, to name only a few. In Adan's Curse, Donoghue brings his special intelligence to bear on some of the intersections where religion and literature provocatively meet.

The Practice of Reading

This lucid and elegantly written book is a sustained conversation about the nature and importance of literary interpretation. Distinguished critic Denis Donoghue argues that we must read texts closely and imaginatively, as opposed to merely or mistakenly theorizing about them. He shows what serious reading entails by discussing texts that range from Shakespeare's plays to a novel by Cormac McCarthy. Donoghue begins with a personal chapter about his own early experiences reading literature while he was living and teaching in Ireland. He then deals with issues of theory, focusing on the validity of different literary theories, on words and their performances, on the impingement of oral and written conditions of reading, and on such current forces as technology and computers that impinge on the very idea of reading. Finally he examines certain works of literature: Shakespeare’s Othello and Macbeth, Swift’s Gulliver's Travels, a passage from Wordsworth’s The Prelude, a chapter of Joyce’s Ulysses, Yeats’s "Leda and the Swan" and "Coole and Ballylee, 1931," and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian demonstrating what these texts have in common and how they must be differentiated through a sympathetic, imaginative, and informed reading.

Donoghue, Professor Denis

Yale University Press

When Denis Donoghue left Warrenpoint and went to Dublin in September 1946, he entered University College as a student of Latin and English. A few months later he also started as a student of lieder at the Royal Irish Academy of Music. These studies have informed his reading of English, Irish, and American literature. Now in this volume, one of our most distinguished readers of modern literature offers his most personal book of literary criticism. Donoghue’s Words Alone isan intellectual memoir, a lucid and illuminating account of his engagement with the works of T. S. Eliot―from initial undergraduate encounters with “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” to later submission to Eliot’s entire writings. “The pleasure of Eliot’s words persists,” Donoghue says, “only because in good faith it can’t be denied.” Submission to Eliot, in Donoghue’s case, involves the ear as much as it does the mind. He is a reader who listens attentively and a writer whose own music in these pages commands attention. Whether he is writing about Eliot’s poetry or confronting the (often contentious) prose, Donoghue eloquently demonstrates what it means to read and to hear a master of language.

Words Alone: The Poet T.S. Eliot

British & Irish

Writing about his newest book, Denis Donoghue says, "I do not offer to say why Jennifer Lopez and Brad Pitt are beautiful, or what cultural axioms are at work in the common agreement that they are. Instead I think of beauty as a value—like its companions, the true and the good—and I ponder the ‘words of tribute’ that are devoted to it." Here one of the foremost living critics of the English language, Denis Donoghue, examines instances of beauty and the language that beauty inspires. 
An appreciative and wide-ranging reader, Donoghue discusses Kant, Schiller, Keats, Hawthorne, Dickinson, Ruskin, Henry James, Proust, Yeats, Housman, Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and many more. He considers some of the main theories of beauty and their terms of reference and appreciation. And he examines the relation of beauty to form: form as found in landscape, persons, poems, paintings, and musical phrases; and form as in the difficult question of beauty and its wild neighbor, the sublime. Writing with his customary elegance and lucidity, Donoghue tells us that beauty is a topic that has once again become interesting and even fashionable, and in this book he shows how it can be discussed with intelligence and decency.

Speaking of Beauty

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by DONOGHUE, Denis. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by DONOGHUE, Denis

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by DONOGHUE, Denis. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Yeats (Modern masters)

Warrenpoint

Connoisseurs of Chaos: Ideas of Order in Modern American Poetry

Connoisseurs of Chaos

Ferocious Alphabets

Adam's Curse: Reflections on Religion and Literature (Erasmus Institute Books)

Adam's Curse: Reflections on Religion and Literature (Erasmus Institute Books)

The Practice of Reading

Words Alone: The Poet T.S. Eliot

Speaking of Beauty