English doc

Primary

Browning, Robert. Poems of Robert Browning. Cambridge, MA: The Riverside Press, 1956.

This edition of Browning’s poetry contains a useful introduction by Donald Smalley that deals with the function of the dramatic monologue and the theory and practice of soliloquies throughout the author’s work. It further offers a series of notes designed to elucidate the various obscurities of certain poems on which this essay shall focus, such as “Porphyria’s Lover” and “My Last Duchess.” It would be useful to cross-reference these with the Norton edition of Browning’s poetry.

Yeats, W.B. Mythologies. New York, NY: Touchstone, 1998.

This contains the essential chapter “In Per Amica Silentia Lunae” from which this essay draws its title. The clarification of Yeats’s attitude to silence and its symbolic significance throughout his prose and poetry is expressed nowhere more clearly than in this text and, as such, it forms an essential reference point for this paper.

Secondary

Bloom, Harold. Yeats. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1970.

This book contains a chapter on Victorian poetry and its impact upon the poetry of Yeats, as well as a close analysis and discussion of a number of the poems on which I intend to focus, including “Long Legged Fly.”

Howes, Marjorie and John Kelly. The Cambridge Companion to W.B. Yeats. New York, NY: Cambridge UP, 2006.

This also contains a useful chapter on Yeats and Victorianism, which will be helpful in an analysis of the extent to which the poet was influenced by Victorian poetic traditions and, by extension, Browning. It also has a chapter on the occult that will be useful for the elucidation of the extent to which the mystical interacts with, and is born out of, silence, as touched upon in “In Per Amica Silentia Lunae.”