Product Description

W. B. Yeats was Romantic and Modernist, mystical dreamer and leader of the Irish Literary Revival, Nobel prizewinner, dramatist and, above all, poet. He began writing with the intention of putting his very self into his poems. T. S. Eliot, one of many who proclaimed the Irishman s greatness, described him as one of those few whose history is the history of their own time, who are part of the consciousness of an age which cannot be understood without them . For anyone interested in the literature of the late nineteenth century and the twentieth century, Yeats's work is essential. This volume gathers the full range of his published poetry, from the hauntingly beautiful early lyrics (by which he is still fondly remembered) to the magnificent later poems which put beyond question his status as major poet of modern times. Paradoxical, proud and passionate, Yeats speaks today as eloquently as ever.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3379 in Books
• Published on: 2000-09-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 432 pages

Customer Reviews

Beautiful
Yeats is without a doubt one of the most significant and influential poets of recent times, and probably the most important Anglo-Irish poet ever. His poems are deeply affecting, especially those concerning his unrequited love for Maud Gonne. They deal with diverse subjects like Irish politics of the time, the Republican movement, and more personal themes like love, growing old, death and the problems he saw facing an artist. My favourite poem is probably "Sailing To Byzantium;" "He Wishes For The Cloths Of Heaven" is beautiful too. I highly recommend this to anyone with even a passing interest in poetry.

"Keats and Yeats are on your side (and Wilde's on mine)"
I must be brief, as my lunch is dangerously close to completion, so here is my Yeats review condensed into a few points:

W.B. Yeats was the greatest poet of the 20th century, even if you only include the works he wrote after 1900.

Looking at his whole body of work, he was a genius and undoubtedly one of the great poets of literature.

Part of what makes him such a genius IMO is his range. At first Yeats seems to live up to how he is sketched - a modern-day (well, 20th century) romanticist with a love of mythology, etc. but then you keep reading and discover that his interests are much wider than just that.

Forget Jackson Pollack, Ernest Hemmingway, etc. - Yeats' life as a searcher for romanticism in a rational society is, I believe, the best model for an artist in modern times there is.

With Yeats, I think more so than other poets, his most minor, uncollected, obscure works are full of wonderful surprises (e.g. the one about H.G. Wells) and so it is important to get the most complete 'Complete Poems of W.B. Yeats as possible'. I read a copy of this very edition in my local library, and I believe this is very much comprehensive.

If you think Yeats had no command over the English language, then it is likely that you either (1) are not familar with modern poetry, which tends to avoid simple rhyming for rhyming's sake, (2) you do not have an eye for subtle nuance (e.g. the rhyming of a word with the exact same word in 'He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven' stripping the verse of a love poem's usual artificiality and underlining its simplicity and naturalness) or (3) you just don't get Yeats and what he's trying to do.

If you like Yeats, your next port of call should be Seamus Heaney. Sometimes Heaney can write utterly opaquely about the most obscure subjects, but he has also written some amazing poetry. To put on my soundbite hat, Heaney is the mid-20th century's own Yeats, the post-Joyce Yeats.

The quotation in my title is from the Smiths' 'Cemetery Gates' if you're wondering, which you probably weren't.

In conclusion: Yeats is great. Is he better than Joyce? Hard to say, as they both wrote primarily in the media they were best at (though don't think I'm claiming any sort of expertise on Irish literature though! This is all IMO) - Yeats poetry, Joyce novels. Just don't assume that Joyce was the modern modernist one and Yeats was old-fashioned, as it isn't that easy.

Yeats's Second Coming
It has long seemed that although Yeat is the best poet in English in our century, Eliot wrote the best poem. For "The Waste Land" captured a spiritual doubt and hunger that started between the wars and remained with us as a kind of heavy inertia; how can we make our lives meaningful, Eliot asked, and showed us that we have no idea where to start. But now such lethargy seems almost quaint; we don't now doubt what to do, but rather we do and doubt where it shall take us. What if all our global, unified and unifying efforts are taking us somewhere terrible? Yeats's poem "The Second Coming" now seems the true herald of our time. Finneran's edition includes this poem in context, in its order in the development of Yeats's work. Read it as Yeat meant it to be read: followed by his equally great poem "A Prayer for my Daughter," where he offers hope in the beauty and innocence of personal ceremony. In a crowded, generic time, Yeats's poems are themselves ceremonies.