In The Yeats Brothers, Calvin Bedient delivers a brilliant exploration of modernism through the mutual illumination provided by Ireland’s greatest poet and greatest painter. By examining the poems of the one and the paintings of the other, he recovers an often overlooked quality both artists embraced in their work—that core feature of modernism, a thoroughgoing preoccupation with motion and fluidity, that terrifying encounter with the universe conceptualized as force.
Bedient’s is the first book to treat W. B. Yeats and Jack Yeats as twin geniuses in the detection and representation of chaos. William Butler Yeats’s love and fear of motion pervade every aspect of his poetry, helping to determine his themes, riddle his images, and shape the cadences of his verse. Jack Yeats’s focus on change and motion caused him to engage with the cross-currents of his time, not—as sometimes thought—to remain locked in the past.
Through daring and nuanced readings of the poems and analyses of the paintings, Bedient reveals the two artists to have been complicit with modernism—against homogeneity, alert to divisions, polyphony, and restlessness in things and in ourselves. Adept in close discussion of poetic and painterly style, and magisterial in his grasp of theorists, Bedient provides us with genuinely new interpretations of the Yeats brothers’ work, and with a more sophisticated understanding of modernism.
