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William Butler Yeats (1865 – 1939) was a great Irish poet, and was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival with Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn and others. He helped to found the Abbey Theatre and served as an Irish Senator for two terms. Born in Sandymount, Ireland, he spent childhood holidays in County Sligo, studying poetry from an early age. Irish legends and the occult feature in the first phase of his work. His earliest volume of lyrical poems was published in 1

Usually it is only in stories or dreams that we feel as though we have been journeying for a long time but realise that we are still in the same place. But this series of articles can have the same effect: we began by looking at Myth and the strange images and tales that spring from the hearts of cultures across the planet; then we examined Romance or Legend, the quests and superhuman accomplishments of larger-than-life figures, striding through magical landscapes. Shortly af

From the darkness come two poles, light and dark; between those poles archetypes form, moving into orbit around one pole or the other. In the gaps between, strange images (birds whose eggshells form the world, dew droplets combining to make reality, and so on) and non-sequiturs (from an ice-giant’s armpit comes the first man and woman, for example) roam unbridled. This is the zone of the Myth. As the light grows stronger, so the images become clarified: in the zone of Roman

Writing is a peculiar field, and one of its oddities is that its practitioners are permitted - even expected, in some cases - to present false identities to the world in the form of ‘pen names’. There are, I think, certain advantages to this. I can think of four: 1. Avoiding Negative Feedback This may be the one that many think of. If you’ve exposed your heart and soul in a piece of work, pouring out emotions which you have perhaps never shared with anyone and making th

From the Editor's Foreword of Vortex: The Inner Circle Writers' Group Literary Anthology 2018, available here: I’ve noticed a trend of questions recently in some writers’ groups regarding the definitions of ‘genre’ and ‘literary’ fiction. Quite often, the starting point for such questions has been genre fiction, with science fiction, fantasy or romance writers and the like asking ‘What is literary fiction?’ Sometimes the answers have been misleading or a little shallow, so

Earlier on, we looked at Northrop Frye's development of what he called fictional ‘modes’, each determined by the relationship of the hero or heroine both to other characters and to the natural environment. The five modes, as outlined in his ground-breaking book Anatomy of Criticism, were: (1) Myth, featuring a world in which entities that we usually call ‘gods’ do barely recognisable things. As we have since seen, going beyond Frye, myths about creation involve something em

We saw in a recent article in this series that the powerful images and motifs of Myth could be found in different forms in what Northrop Frye called Romance, the genre of legends and tales of heroes and demigods. Examining the Matter of Britain, we detected quite easily the presence of most of the great archetypes - the Wise Old Figure, the Comic Companion, the Emerging Warrior, the Aware Protagonist, the Submerging Female, the Shadow Protagonist and the Antagonist - partakin

Some assertions: Myth brings something out of nothing via a set of two poles, between which is a spectrum of points: Pole # 1 Close to Pole # 1 Equidistant from either Pole Close to Pole # 2 Pole # 2 This abstract scale is then personified as the great archetypes: The Wise Old Man The Comic Companion The Warrior Companion The Protagonist The Female Companion The Shadow Protagonist The Antagonist At first, in myths such as the creation stories told in culture