An Irish Airman Foresees His Death (For Further Study)

For Further Study

• Ardagh, John, Ireland and the Irish: Portrait of a Changing Society, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1994.

  This source tries a bit too much to soften the violence and oppression that are a fact of recent Irish history. As the dust jacket describes, the book is “upbeat.” The facts are here, but the tone is more pro-British than a nationalist like Yeats would accept.

• Crawford, Fred D., British Poets of the Great War, Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1988.

  Yeats is, of course, the exception to the other poets in this book: he would deny that he was either a British poet or a war poet. Still, readers can get a good sense of the time and the situation from this work.

• O’Broin, Leon, Protestant Nationalists in Revolutionary Ireland: The Stopford Connection, Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble Books, 1995.

  This book looks at the movement for independence in the late 1800s and early 1900s, concentrating on one family, the Stopfords, and their acquaintances. Yeats, of course, is one of those acquaintances.

• Tuohy, Frank, Yeats, New York: MacMillan Publishing Co., 1976.

  A much more complex and comprehensive biography than it first seems, this book contains much information about Yeats’s family, especially his father, and puts the poet’s amazing works into the perspective of his life.