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Article: Perpetuum mobile: Metamorphoses des corps et des oeuvres de Vinci a Montaigne.(Review)(Brief Article)
- Article from:
- The Modern Language Review
- Article date:
- April 1, 1999
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1999 Modern Humanities Research Association. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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W. B. Yeats: A Life. Vol. I: The Apprentice Mage, 1865-1914. By R. F. FOSTER. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. 1997. xxxi + 640 pp. 25 [pounds sterling].
The Yeats who emerges from this long-awaited first part of R. F. Foster's splendid biography is very much a maker on the make, and it is primarily himself that he is remaking. Foster demonstrates the links between Yeats's 'continuing reworking of his poems' and 'his own heroic self-construction' as 'an impresario of his own image' (p. xxv), deploying a mage's 'alchemical capacity' (p. xxvi) to transmute the events of a crowded life not only into art but also into a fabricated personal history, 'always ...