1William Butler Yeats is one of the most documented and researched writers in the field of Irish studies. Consequently, any new publication is closely scrutinised when it comes out, especially those that are particularly ambitious, such as is the case for Charles I. Armstrong, Adrian Paterson and Tom Walker’s Edinburgh Companion to W. B. Yeats and the Arts. The editors of the volume do not shy away from their aim. Indeed, in the first paragraphs of their introduction, they establish the originality of their undertaking, highlighting its transdisciplinary nature that allows to give a more complex and complete vision of Yeats’s contribution to the arts. The editors also put a most welcome emphasis on the collaborative aspect of this work, true both through the diversity of the contributors’ profiles but also through Yeats’s own encounters throughout his life, which both keeps up with the freshness of the approach adopted here and hints to the latter’s potential for the future of Irish studies.

2The organisation of the book gives, from the start, a good sense of what the editors mean by “art”. The table of contents clearly demonstrates how thought-through the volume has been. Divided into three parts, the volume firstly and methodically establishes a theoretical and conceptual basis with its first part, which allows to better understand what “art” was for Yeats, from disciplinary, philosophical and practical perspectives. The seven chapters composing this section work very efficiently together and expose that Yeats somewhat embodies the notion of Gesamtkunstwerk, borne out of his education and family’s relationship to arts but also due to his own curiosity and embracing of multiple influences that he gleaned from his readings, personal and professional encounters, as well as from his travels. Whilst some chapters deepen certain aspects of Yeats’s life and career that had already been touched on – such as his connection with the Arts and Crafts movement, the Franco-Irish links, and the influence of his political work on the arts in Ireland –, other chapters propose interesting applications of more recent theoretical developments, namely ecocriticism and elements that tie in with Digital Humanities. The section even concludes with a very appealing chapter by Margaret Mills Harper, who draws connections between Yeats’s Cuchulain and the figure of the cowboy, which gives a whole new dimension to Yeatsian studies and relocates the writer within a much broader geo-cultural context than one may expect.

3After a first very solid stepping stone, the second part “Visual and Material Culture” further examines Yeats’s trans-artistic approach to his artistic practice. More specifically, this section explores how visual arts influenced and were influenced by the writer, and how these relationships materialise, so to speak. Here again, the chapters offer a complete and detailed analysis of how Yeats was at the centre of a very complex artistic and cultural network, sometimes as a master-puppeteer, at other times as the receptacle of those various influences. One after the others, the contributors to this section draw attention to the various stages through which the writer went, all agreeing that although Yeats’s artistry was shaped by influences as diverse as romanticism, exoticism, occultism, but also contemporary politics, he too had an impact on the movements that he traversed over the decades. In this section, Yeats appears even more evidently as a multifaceted centralising force that advocated for the transformative value of art and its collaborative potential, be it transdisciplinary, transcultural or even transgenerational as Rui Carvalho Homem demonstrates in his chapter “Poetry, Painting and Posterity: Yeats as Example and Burden”. In addition, this section is the opportunity to unveil the more practical / managerial aspect of Yeats’s implication in the arts sector, an aspect that rarely gets so much attention. In chapters exploring this dimension, Yeats is shown both as being an artist actively engaged in the material production of his books, but also as a member of a family that owned a press and so made editing and publishing decisions, thus pointedly putting in discussion different art forms and establishing their own aesthetic codes.

4The final and third part of The Edinburgh Companion to W. B. Yeats and the Arts – “Performance and Sound” – is the most innovative section of this volume and is based on the consensus that Yeats is primarily seen as a “textual poet”, which negatively impacts how he is regarded beyond this representation. Bringing together practical and aesthetic aspects, the contributors examine the performative dimension of Yeats’s artistic production that was mostly the result of collaborations with contemporary artists such as Ninette de Valois and Florence Farr, or was motivated by the influence of established cultural figures such as Wagner or Raftery. Once again, the chapters explore Yeats’s poetic and dramatic production, but through completely different perspectives. Indeed, in this section, the contributors focus on Yeats’s experimentation with music and musicality in his plays and poetry, which Isabelle Stuart explores in depth in her chapter on “Yeats’s and Florence Farr’s ‘New Art’ of Verse Speaking”, which almost reminds us of today’s Spoken Word stage. In other chapters, the examination of the role of decors and staging choices highlight Yeats’s relationship to bodies and movements through his use of dance – a much neglected aspect – as well as his use of costumes as a means to blur gender-boundaries, as Zsuzsanna Balázs’s chapter argues.

5To some extent, and despite a clear structure that is designed to guide its readership towards a more expansive contextualisation of Yeats, the volume successfully transcends its own boundaries in the sense that each section and each chapter is not hermetic to the others. In other words, this ambitious volume successfully establishes new “guidelines” to Yeatsian studies and hints to other thematical ways of approaching Yeats as what we could term a “complete artist”. More specifically, in its ensemble, the volume suggests to approach Yeats through a gender lens – due to the re-evaluation and revalorisation of feminine and queer figures that contributed to Yeats’s success – and continuously highlights its transnational and transcultural connections. Moreover, the volume is decidedly political in the sense that the editors and the contributors cast light onto the politics at work behind the artistic developments of the time and refuse to overlook Yeats’s polemical flirtations with fascism and nationalism during the early 20^th century, despite what he evidently owed to transcultural encounters. This aspect is an appreciable bonus to an already enjoyable, fascinating and thorough academic volume that keeps its promises, if not more.