The Last Minstrels: Yeats and the Revival of the Bardic Arts - Tapa dura

provides a detailed and fascinating narrative ... insightful and meticulously researched ... The LastMinstrels: Yeats and the Revival of the Bardic Arts is essential to our understanding of modern literature and of W. B. Yeats. This is an impressive capstone work that only a scholar of Schuchard's stature, skills, and background in Yeats, Eliot, and modern literature could have written. (Mary Helen Thuente, Modern Philology)

...in this extraordinary book, something previously regarded as a minor aspect of Yeat's antiquarian oddity turns out, rather amazingly, to be central to the development of poetry in the early 20th century. (THES)

There is no doubt that this book represents an important contribution to Yeats studies, and opens up interesting avenues of scholarship when it comes to the story of modernist poetry. No doubt too that it is meticulously researched, and written in a fine and engaging style, combining a handsome biographical sweep with an economic turning of minutiae (Adrian Paterson, Notes and Queries)

The Last Minstrels is quite an accomplished piece of literary history. Schuchard unearths an impressive wealth of information from a wide variety of sources. (Wim Van Mierlo, English)

Schuchard's book is a rare thing: a combination of exhaustive, meticulous scholarship... It is impossible to do justice here to the breadth, depth, and sheer erudition of Schuchard's research (Marjorie Howes, Irish Literary Supplement)

both a monumental work of impeccable scholarship and a compelling narrative (Marjorie Howes, Irish Literary Supplement)

In Ronald Schuchard's sharply focused piece of literary biography and history, Yeats's image gets just the kind of make-over that he himself would have wanted (English Studies)

an essential resource for understanding the early modernist milieu in London and Dublin. (Frances Dickey, Essays in Criticism)

this graceful and scholarly book affirmsthe importance of music and the great 'other' in Yeat's imagination. (Harry White, Music & Letters)

Recovering a lost literary movement that was the most consuming preoccupation of W. B. Yeats's literary life and the most integral to his poetry and drama, Ronald Schuchard's The Last Minstrels provides an historical, biographical, and critical reconstruction of the poet's lifelong attempt to restore an oral tradition by reviving the bardic arts of chanting and musical speech. From the beginning of his career Yeats was determined to return the 'living voice' of the poet from exile to the centre of culture - on its platforms, stages, and streets - thereby establishing a spiritual democracy in the arts for the non-reading as well as the reading public.

Schuchard's study enhances our understanding of Yeats's cultural nationalism, his aims for the Abbey Theatre, and his dynamic place in a complex of interrelated arts in London and Dublin. With a wealth of new archival materials, the narrative intervenes in literary history to show the attempts of Yeats and Florence Farr to take the 'new art' of chanting to Great Britain, America, and Europe, and it reveals for the first time the influence of their auditory poetics on the visual paradigm of the Imagists. The penultimate chapter examines the adjustments Yeats made for his movement during the war, including chanting and other adaptations from Noh drama for his dance plays and choruses, until the practice of his 'unfashionable art' became dormant in the 1920s before the restless rise of realism. The final chapter resurrects his heroic effort in the 1930s to reunite poetry and music and reconstitute his dream of a spiritual democracy through the medium of public broadcasting.