A Rumor of Soul: The Poetry of W.B. Yeats (Wiseblood Classics)

Yeats is often cherry-picked for his swooniest love poems, but Webster reveals the deeper truth that draws us to yearn for Innisfree and wish for the cloths of heaven: in Yeats, we find a powerful and seductive conviction that the human soul exists and is immortal. This belief is by no means a given in modern society, as Webster shows by orchestrating a chord of voices, from contemporary philosophers to Arcade Fire. It is an intimidating consensus, and Yeats becomes, in Webster's telling, a rebellious voice urging the soul to "clap its hands and sing, and louder sing.

Meredith McCann / Editor-In-Chief / Dappled Things


Jeremiah Webster stands in the great tradition of essayists who use the literary form of the introduction to cast a vision. He knows Yeats, of course. He is comfortable and familiar with Yeats as only a scholar who loves the subject can be. Loves, not simply knows. His introduction functions as a literate, insightful, and glorious appeal that soul (yes, soul!) once again inhabit the world of learning, and it does so with passion and elegance.

Gerald Sittser / Professor of Theology / Whitworth University


Jeremiah Webster gives W.B. Yeats voice once again and in doing so finds his own prophetic and poetic voice. Webster heralds our civilization's loss of soul and suggests the imaginative spirit of W.B. Yeats as a worthy and effective antidote for such a devastating malady. He speculates that "When a civilization denies this invisible angel, a debasement of culture and the physical body follows. Human life is reduced to behavioral instinct, naturalistic cause and effect, and when the distractions of carnival do not suffice, the gravitational pull of despair takes hold." Such despair needs the soul-food of Yeats and Webster.

Fr. Robert Dalgleish / Advent Anglican / Bellevue, Washington