The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats

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William Butler Yeats, whom many consider this century's greatest poet, began as a bard of the Celtic Twilight, reviving legends and Rosicrucian symbols. By the early 1900s, however, he was moving away from plush romanticism, his verse morphing from the incantatory rhythms of "I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree" into lyrics "as cold and passionate as the dawn." At every stage, however, Yeats plays a multiplicity of poetic roles. There is the romantic lover of "When You Are Old" and "A Poet to His Beloved" ("I bring you with reverent Hands / The books of my numberless dreams..."). And there are the far more bitter celebrations of Maud Gonne, who never accepted his love and engaged in too much politicking for his taste: "Why should I blame her that she filled my days / With misery, or that she would of late / Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways, / Or hurled the little streets upon the great, / Had they but courage equal to desire?" There is also the poet of conscience--and confrontation. His 1931 "Remorse for Intemperate Speech" ends: "Out of Ireland have we come. / Great hatred, little room, / Maimed us at the start. / I carried from my mother's womb / A fanatic heart."

Yeats was to explore several more sides of himself, and of Ireland, before his Last Poems of 1938-39. Many are difficult, some snobbish, others occult and spiritualist. As Brendan Kennelly writes, Yeats "produces both poppycock and sublimity in verse, sometimes closely together." On the other hand, many prophetic masterworks are poppycock-free--for example, "The Second Coming" ("Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world...") and such inquiries into inspiration as "Among School Children" ("O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance?"). And at his best, Yeats extends the meaning of love poetry beyond the obviously romantic: love becomes a revolutionary emotion, attaching the poet to friends, history, and the passionate life of the mind. --Kerry Fried

Book Description

The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats includes all of the poems authorized by Yeats for inclusion in his standard canon. Breathtaking in range, it encompasses the entire arc of his career, from luminous reworkings of ancient Irish myths and legends to passionate meditations on the demands and rewards of youth and old age, from exquisite, occasionally whimsical songs of love, nature, and art to somber and angry poems of life in a nation torn by war and uprising. In observing the development of rich and recurring images and themes over the course of his body of work, we can trace the quest of this century's greatest poet to unite intellect and artistry in a single magnificent vision.

Revised and corrected, this edition includes Yeats's own notes on his poetry, complemented by explanatory notes from esteemed Yeats scholar Richard J. Finneran. The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats is the most comprehensive edition of one of the world's most beloved poets available in paperback.

Customer Reviews:

Awesome Collection.......2006-07-10

This book contains all of Yeat's published poetry and I believe alot of his dramatic writings. Yeat's has to be one of the best english poets of all time. I put him up next to Shakespeare. His poems are full of mystery, and alot of romance and polotics. It's really great stuff.

Yeats, one of the greatest.......2006-05-21

The short space that is offered here for reviews is nowhere near sufficient to review the life's works of one of Ireland's and the world's greatest poets. However I must at least try to describe the beauty that is the poetry of William Butler Yeats.

Perhaps Yeats is at his finest when reflecting on love, usually unrequited. Yeats manages to produce love poems that have a genuine passion that is surprisingly rare in poetry, specifically that of the modern day. Perhaps Yeats is representative of a type of romanticism that is moribund in modern literature, this is surely a tragic shame.

However Yeats' examination of the human condition is not restricted to the romantic. In 'What Then?', Yeats examines the frantic and vain human search for an ultimate meaning or significance. He manages this in a far more poetic and succinct way than many poets who have gone before him. In 'A Man Young and Old', Yeats runs us through the gamut of human experience in a wonderous,yet harrowing manner.

These are but a handful of examples of this beautiful poetry that demands to be read by any lover of literature.

Great poet, great work, amazing compilation!.......2005-11-15

A great compilation of Yeats works, while other compilations have excellent notes and essays regarding his works this one has many of his poems (and series of poems) all in one book. An outstanding book to own, beautifully compiled in this soft cover book (which has surprisingly held up quite well against years of battering as I carry it with me from time to time).

magnificent poems on cheap paper.......2005-10-24

I trust it goes without saying that William Butler Yeats is one of the greatest English-language poets of all time. This volume contains his entire body of verse, and is a magnificent treasure trove that will delight and stun the reader for decades.

I give two stars to the cheap materials used to create this masterpiece. I literally had this book out of the Amazon box for a matter of hours before the cover started to curl of its own accord, as though possessed by a poetry-hating demon. The paper is low-grade and coarse, with an unappealing brownish tinge.

Despite my love of Yeats, I find that I unconsciously tend to keep this book on the shelf just to keep its ugliness out of site, and I am by no means an aesthete. If you can find a slightly nicer version, it is worth paying a little extra.

Hauntingingly beautiful, ageless poetry!.......2005-09-12

I had never taken the time to enjoy Yeats' poetry before although I had read single poems on occasion. It is an experience not to be missed to sit and read his better-known poetry all in one sitting. The beauty of the words and imagery is then much more apparent. Yeats writes a lot about mysticism and the occult, and ancient Ireland comes alive as you read his beautiful words. I read that Yeats, although he wrote poetry all his life, would only put down three or four lines per day. He was such a perfectionist that he wanted to make sure that his lines were perfect. It seems such a tedious procss, but what beautiful words he wrote! His time could not have been better spent than in creating three beautiful and perfect lines per day. His poetry changed as he aged, but it kept getting better and better. His earlier poetry portrayed a lot about faeries and the dream world the he lived in himself when he was young. The lyrics were tuneful and romantic. As he aged, the romanticism changed considerably and his poems were harder-driven with very deep messages underneath the words. These are truly masterpieces, and Yeats comes by his reputation as one of the greatest English writing poets of all time.

The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Volume X: Later Articles and Reviews : Uncollected Articles, Reviews, and Radio Broadcasts Written After 1900

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The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Volume X: Later Articles and Reviews : Uncollected Articles, Reviews, and Radio Broadcasts Written After 1900
William Butler Yeats
Manufacturer: Scribner
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0684807270

Book Description

The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume X: Later Articles and Reviews is part of a fourteen-volume series under the general editorship of eminent Yeats scholars Richard J. Finneran and George Mills Harper. This first complete edition includes virtually all of the Nobel laureate's published work, in authoritative texts and with extensive explanatory notes.

Later Articles and Reviews consists of fifty-four prose pieces published between 1900 and Yeats's death in January 1939 and benefits from the notes and emendations of Yeats scholar Colton Johnson. The pieces collected here are occasional, and they reflect the many interests and engagements of Yeats in his maturity. No longer a reviewer or polemicist, Yeats is an international figure: a senator in the fledgling Irish state, a defining modern poet, a distinguished essayist. And here we have him writing -- with grace, wit, and passion -- on the state of Ireland in the world, on Irish language and Irish literature, on his artistic contemporaries, on the Abbey Theater, on divorce, on censorship, on his evolution as a poet and dramatist, on his own poetry.

Volume X also includes texts of ten radio programs Yeats broadcast between 1931 and 1937. This is not only the first collection but also the first printing of Yeats's radio work, which constitutes the largest previously uncollected body of his writings and possibly the most important to remain largely unstudied. Carefully assembled from manuscripts, typescripts, broadcast scripts, and fragmentary recordings, the programs range from a scripted interview on contemporary issues to elaborate stagings of his own and others' poetry. One of the radio programs is presented in an appendix complete with the commissioned musical score that set Yeats's poetry to music, Yeats's own emendations on the BBC broadcast script, and the diacritical notes with which the broadcast reader indicated Yeats's interpretive instructions.

Here, then, is seasoned Yeats, writing and speaking vigorously and with keen personal insight about the modern age and his place in it.

Customer Reviews:

A Poet's Vision.......2002-02-05

Recently stopping at Shannon Duty-free, I found this beautiful
book. The words of Yeats and the photos of Le Garsmeur combine
to transport you to another time, another place...and where else
would you rather be than exploring that Emerald Isle with its
famous bard? Turn off the TV; put some Irish music on the stereo;
pour a glass of red wine and sail away. I guarantee you'll be
planning another trip to Ireland after this experience.

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Gitanjali
What a master of words
Gitanjali
Great Indian Poet
Awesome

Gitanjali
Rabindranath Tagore , and W. B. Yeats
Manufacturer: Digireads.com
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 1420926306

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An illuminating collection of inspirational poems by a Nobel Laureate

While traveling through one of the poorest regions in India, W. B. Yeats was amazed to discover the women in the tea fields singing the songs and poems of Rabindranath Tagore. This striking scene led the great Irish poet to appreciate the depth of India's far-reaching tradition of poetry and the fame of this one Indian poet. Tagore's work is without equal and plays an eminent role in twentieth century Indian literature.

The publication of the English edition of Gitanjali in 1911 earned Rabindranath Tagore the Nobel Prize in literature. A collection of over one hundred inspirational poems, Gitanjali covers the breadth of life's experiences, from the quiet pleasure of observing children at play to a man's struggle with his god. These are poems that transcend time and place.

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Song Offerings A collection of prose translations made by the author from the original Bengali. Please Note: This book has been reformatted to be easy to read in true text, not scanned images that can sometimes be difficult to decipher. The Microsoft eBook has a contents page linked to the chapter headings for easy navigation. The Adobe eBook has bookmarks at chapter headings and is printable up to two full copies per year. Both versions are text searchable.

Customer Reviews:

Gitanjali.......2007-10-05

Simply one of the best books I have ever read. Very moving, and more importantly gives you a real perspective on life.

What a master of words.......2007-08-20

I don't think I am qualified enough (in Literature) to even comprehend the full meaning of every poem, but his gift is apparent from the first one's. He had an amazing eye for things in life most people will never care to even notice, and he had the talent to put forth those images and feelings in writing. No wonder he is hailed has one of the greatest literary minds in India. for people who want to explore more about Tagore, poetry wasn't his talent..he was a writer (plays and novels), a composer, an artist, and a Humanitarian.

Gitanjali.......2007-08-08

Extremely disappointing to find that the verses of Gitanjali are not numbered in this edition. Important that numbers be included for referencing in communication with others with whom one is discussing this classic.

Great Indian Poet.......2006-03-20

I gave this book to an friend of mine who lives in India and she just raves about it. Tagore is a great poet and this is in my opinion his best colletion.

Awesome.......2005-09-09

A magnanimous spirit's spiritual legacy.
It made me close my eyes and ruminate on the world as it was meant to be.
Reading just one or two poems might be unfulfilling or even boring.
The reader has to allow himself to be drawn in and read 7-8 of them and then perhaps re-read them. That's when the magic truly sets in.
It then indulges the nooks of the mind that daily routines tend to push out of sight.
The poems are easy to read since they are fairly short (9-10 lines often), but they put forth a lot more than that.
The original version in Bengali is supposed to be even better, but the English translation was special enough for me.
Brilliant is an understatement.

Yeats's Poetry, Drama, and Prose (Norton Critical Editions)

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Another fine edition of the works of a great poet
Very nice compilation, especially regarding prose!

Yeats's Poetry, Drama, and Prose (Norton Critical Editions)
William Butler Yeats
Manufacturer: W. W. Norton
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0393974979

Book Description

No other series of classic texts achieves the editorial standard of the Norton Critical Editions. Each volume combines the most authoritative text available with contextual and critical materials that bring the work to life for students. Careful editing, first-rate translation, thorough explanatory annotations, chronologies, and selected bibliographies make each text accessible to students while encouraging in-depth study. Each volume in the series is printed on acid-free paper, and every text remains in print. Norton Critical Editions are the choice of excellence for scholarship for students at more than 2,500 colleges and universities worldwide.

Customer Reviews:

Another fine edition of the works of a great poet.......2006-01-09

There are by this time many collections of the works of Yeats, and this is one of the good ones. Aside from containing the major plays and poems it has critical essays by contemporaries of Yeats and important critical voices of our own time, such as Helen Vendler, Harold Bloom, and the poet Seamus Heaney.
As for the work itself, however historically important the plays, and however of curiosity value 'The Autobiography' and other prose writings the Yeats that lives is in the poetry.
It is that lyrical greatness the power of song manifested early on which later was deepened into even greater poetry. From 'Innisfee' and "Song of the Wandering Aengus ' to the poetry of 'Byzantium' and 'Among the Schoolchildren'.
The great lines, a small sample of which follows"

And we will wander hand in hand / through hollow lands and hily lands/
And pluck till time and times are done/ The silver apples of the moon/ The golden apples of the sun/

"We must lie down where all the ladders start/ in the foul rag and bone shop of the heart."

" The best lack all conviction, and the worst are full of passionate intensity"

"But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you/ and loved the sorrows of your changing face."

Very nice compilation, especially regarding prose!.......2005-11-15

This is an excellent book, produced with excellent quality. While it isn't the most complete anthology in the world as far as his poems are concerned (for this reason The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Volume I by Finneran is a much better choice), the prose found within the book are excellent. Another thing worth noting is the lengthily essays by other well known authors which tend to either be criticisms or praise for Mr. Yeats, truly magnificent in that department! Again, the focus of this anthology is much different from other supremely divine works (such as the one previously mentioned).

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Biography and Literary criticism as one
Biograph Master
Admirable, but not Perfect
Casting a Cold Eye

Yeats: The Man and the Masks
Richard Ellmann
Manufacturer: W. W. Norton & Company
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Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0393008592

Book Description

The definitive biography of William Butler Yeats. The most influential poet of his age, Yeats eluded the grasp of many who sought to explain him. In this classic critical examination of the poet, Richard Ellmann strips away the masks of his subject: occultist, senator of the Irish Free State, libidinous old man, and Nobel Prize winner.

Customer Reviews:

Biography and Literary criticism as one.......2006-01-17

Ellmann was both a masterful biographer and first- rate literary critic. In this early book he writes an excellent account of the life of Yeats, and combines with an overall analysis of Yeats' literary development. He probes deeply into the symbolic and mythic meaning of Yeats' poetry and provides for the lay-reader a key to this often complex poetry's, understanding.
Ellmann would go on later to write his much larger masterpiece , the biography of Joyce- but here as a young man he shows a surprising depth of understanding of the full range of Yeats' problems through his remarkable creative, and not easy personal, life.

Biograph Master.......2003-04-12

Ellmann was only 30 when he published this in 1948, less than 10 years after Yeats's death; he was the first biographer to see Yeats's papers in their chaotic entirety. What an astounding job! You'd think this would read like a warm-up for his later magisterial biographies of Joyce and Wilde, but "The Man and the Masks" holds its own against those works, giving a sensitive, economical portrait of an unusually fractured poet.

Ellmann stresses Yeats's life-long effort to forge his thoughts into a unified system in the teeth of inbred skepticism, shyness and vacillation. He draws a discreet curtain over the sexual parts of Yeats's life but compensates with a keen understanding of the courage it took for this diffident, ill-read & dreamy man to make himself by fits and starts into a modern poet. My favorite parts of the book were the sections where Ellmann compares earlier drafts of the poems to the printed versions, showing just how hard-won Yeats's genius was. He tempers a critical eye towards Yeats's excesses--the wild mysticism, the Fascist sympathies, the arrogant public demeanor--with an understanding of Yeats's deep need for masks. According to Ellmann, Yeats's theories and systems weren't dogmas so much as postures he assumed to fulfill his own desire for a certainty of belief he never quite attained. Ellmann shows how that drive shaped the poems and ultimately rescued them from the deadness certitude would have brought. A classic study and an excellent starting-point for further reading on Yeats's life and work.

Admirable, but not Perfect.......2000-06-24

Though I have the greatest admiration for Ellman, I must say that this critical biography of Yeats has a few too many blindspots, is too vague and shapeless in its outline of Yeats' life, to satisfy entirely. Roy Foster's two-volume account is ultimately preferable because far more complete.

Casting a Cold Eye.......2000-06-06

THE definitive, open, and engaging study of the man T.S.Eliot declared the greatest poet of his age. Richard Ellman is no longer with us, but this is a monument of Yeats biography and criticism, the book which all subsequent biographers try to rewrite. The text itself, written as it was amidst a flurry of uncollected papers in the forties and with the co-operation of W.B.'s widow George, is understandably reticent about some elements of the poet's private life, notably his early lovers and extra-marital affairs; but the introduction printed with this new edition fills in many of the blanks, and gives the reasoning for Ellman's assertion that Yeats's affair with Maud Gonne was indeed finally consummated, confirming a suspicion hitherto based only on ambiguous references in letters and the poem 'A Man Young and Old'. Most of all, however, it is Ellman's sensitive and insightful treatment of Yeats's at once shy and self-possessed nature that impresses; the writer will never have a more accurate critic, and the man never a more sincere and biting appraisal of his contradictions. This is the place to start if you are interested in Yeats: you may not find the book or the man that you were expecting, an easy dreamy life of lost women and lake isles, but the portrait is truer, and the artistic genius more clearly delineated than in any other book on the subject, and there have been many. Ellman went on to write the definitive lives of James Joyce and Oscar Wilde; that his first essay in literary biography stands comparison with these is its own testament.

Prisoner of Conscience: One Man's Remarkable Journey from Repression to Freedom

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Prisoner of Conscience: One Man's Remarkable Journey from Repression to Freedom
Charles Yeats
Manufacturer: Random House UK
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 1846040019

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Charles Yeats, ordained priest and former Amnesty International Prisoner of Conscience, has lived much of his life on the frontline. Raised in privilege, his life changed forever when he was called for military service in apartheid South Africa. As a conscientious objector, Yeats faced inevitable arrest. His experiences in jail make for compelling reading, as do his comments on Western imperialism and his insights on how we might create a lasting world peace.

The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Volume IV: Early Essays (Collected Works of W B Yeats)

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The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Volume IV: Early Essays (Collected Works of W B Yeats)
William Butler Yeats , Richard J. Finneran , and George Bornstein
Manufacturer: Scribner
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Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0684807297

Book Description

The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume IV: Early Essays is part of a fourteen-volume series under the general editorship of eminent Yeats scholars George Bornstein and George Mills Harper. These volumes include virtually all of the Nobel laureate's published work, in authoritative texts with extensive explanatory notes.

Early Essays, edited by the internationally esteemed Yeats scholars George Bornstein and the late Richard J. Finneran, includes the contents of the two most important collections of Yeats's critical prose, Ideas of Good and Evil(1903) and The Cutting of an Agate(1912, 1919). Among the seminal essays are considerations of Blake, Shakespeare, Shelley, Spenser, and Synge, as well as an extended discussion of the Japanese Noh theatre. The first scholarly edition of these materials, Early Essays offers a corrected text and detailed annotation of all allusions. Several appendices gather materials from early printings which were later excluded, as well as illuminating black-and-white illustrations.

Early Essays is an essential sourcebook for understanding Yeats's career as both writer and literary critic, and for the development of modern poetry and criticism. Here, Yeats works out many of his key ideas on poetry, politics, and the theater. He gives interpretations of writers critical to his development and presents a compelling vision of Ireland and the modern world during the last decade of the nineteenth century and first two decades of the twentieth. As T. S. Eliot remarked, Yeats "was one of those few whose history is the history of their own time, who are a part of the consciousness of an age which cannot be understood without them." This volume displays a crucial part of that history.

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Poetry has often been considered an irrational genre, more expressive than logical, more meditative than given to coherent argument. And yet, in each of the four very different poets she considers here, Helen Vendler reveals a style of thinking in operation; although they may prefer different means, she argues, all poets of any value are thinkers.

The four poets taken up in this volume--Alexander Pope, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and William Butler Yeats--come from three centuries and three nations, and their styles of thinking are characteristically idiosyncratic. Vendler shows us Pope performing as a satiric miniaturizer, remaking in verse the form of the essay, Whitman writing as a poet of repetitive insistence for whom thinking must be followed by rethinking, Dickinson experimenting with plot to characterize life's unfolding, and Yeats thinking in images, using montage in lieu of argument.

With customary lucidity and spirit, Vendler traces through these poets' lines to find evidence of thought in lyric, the silent stylistic measures representing changes of mind, the condensed power of poetic thinking. Her work argues against the reduction of poetry to its (frequently well-worn) themes and demonstrates, instead, that there is always in admirable poetry a strenuous process of thinking, evident in an evolving style--however ancient the theme--that is powerful and original.

Customer Reviews:

Surprise! Poets are thinkers!.......2007-06-27

Vendler is very entertaining--she truly holds her reader and gets us right inside the poems themselves. That's rare among today's literary critics, an almost forgotten way of thinking about poetry.

"Even when a poem seems to be a spontaneous outburst of feeling, it is being directed as a feat of ordered language, by something one can only call thought. Yet in most accounts of the internal substance of poetry, critics continue to emphasize the imaginative or irrational or psychological or 'expressive' base of poetry; it is thought to be an art of which there can be no science."

She goes on to illustrate for us what "poetic thinking" actually is with illustrations from some of our greatest poets.

Readers of my reviews will know of my enthusiasm for Vendler's commentary on Shakespeare's sonnets The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets as well as my appreciation for Emily Dickinson as shown in my reviews of The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition and The Cambridge Companion to Emily Dickinson (Cambridge Companions to Literature).

Vendler's treatment of Emily Dickinson is especially interesting. The great crisis in Dickinson's poetry happens when her instinctive practice of serially filled in chromatic advance encounters unavoidable fissure, fracture, rupture and abyss.

And what an opening this provides Dickinson!

Vendler guides us through the opened up strategies Dickinson employs in "After great pain, a formal feeling comes" (372; 1862); "Before I got my eye put out-" 336; 1862) and many other great poems. She is at her best, I think, in her treatment of "Renunciation - is a piercing Virtue" (782; 1863).

Poets have what they refer to as "moves," or ways of handling particular situations that come up in the writing of poetry. William Stafford has "moves" and he talks about them frequently in his writings on poetry. Some of the very best "moves" are the ones Dickinson makes--and certainly Yeats as well. Vendler as a critic is very sensitive to this. She is always on the trail and looking for the "moves" a poet is making.

Vendler's looks are convincing, even though she may not be the last word on everything and she may not always get everything exactly right.

With a good deal of literary criticism today you as a reader want to scream: "Stop! Read the poem you nitwit!"

Thank the stars, there's Vendler.

Thinking betwixt the lines: scientific rigor and received divine inspiration........2006-07-04

Arguably the most widely read poetry critic in the US today, Professor Helen Hennessey Vendler displays characteristic erudition in this work on Pope, Whitman, Dickinson and Yeats. Reviewing her book is as recursive as viewing a picture in a dream.

Her arguments rescue poem making from the exclusive precinct of mythical and mystical mediums yet they do not surrender it to the uncompromising demands of logical positivists. As strongly as John Hollander craves rhyme and reason, Vendler imputes intentionality. For each of the four poets she reads, she demonstrates quintessential styles in rational thought and lyrical composition without any of them sacrificing variety.

There are interesting suggestions in this book - one, for instance, is that where the prolific reader-writer-critic and her former colleague at Harvard, Harold Bloom, an acclaimed Shakespeare authority, makes assertions about poets and their poems, Vendler, a veteran Yeats scholar, produces evidence. A devotee and biographer of Irish Nobel laureate, Seamus Heaney, Vendler, the polymath, who holds an undergraduate degree in Chemistry, is a literary guide as accessible to the lay reader as she is to the academic. Would not Emily Dickinson have reaffirmed that Vendler's mind is wider than the sky?

An invitation to sample Vendler's resourcefulness, eloquence and control of her material in a Harvard classroom is currently posted on each of Amazon.com's web site for Vendler's books, "Part of Nature, Part of Us: Modern American Poets" and "The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets and Critics." This thorough, 48-minute explication of Yeats' poem "Among School Children," an intertexture of Greek mythology, philosophy and mathematics, continues for about ten pages in Poets Thinking.

One note of caution: the first impression of this book was dated 2004 and it had 142 pages - be careful to purchase the one on this page, the `New Ed' edition that has 160 pages.

Not an Easy, but a Rewarding Read.......2005-08-11

I can't believe this book hasn't been reviewed yet. I found it a very thought-provoking insight into the techniques of these four poets. I particularly enjoyed the analyses of Whitman and Yeats, with the Pope and Dickinson running close second. This is not popularized dumbed-down literary criticism, but a rigorous examination of substantive issues. You will get out of it what you put into it.

Pope: His caricature devices include synecdoche, diminutive nicknames, scientific reduction (gold is yellow dirt), classical allusion, anticlimax (wisest, brightest, meanest), and word substitution (damned to everlasting [condemnation] fame).

Whitman: One of his devices is to state things reportorially, and then to restate them from a position of extreme empathetic identification with the things described, shifting from an emphasis on verbs to an emphasis on nouns; narrative incident turns to lyric description.

Dickinson: She gives the semblance of control by dividing a process into a series of arbitrary slots which she fills with detail, e.g a poem about a train's journey makes several stops at certain places, but other possible places it could have stopped are not mentioned. Vendler labels this "chromatic linear advance." Early on there was a definite ending in her poems, but this became more ambiguous as she got older. Also, things went from being ordered chronologically to being ordered in an emotional hierarchy.

Yeats: Overlayed images to present a vertical harmony of choral unison. Here's a typical Vendler sentence: "Yeats's bitter diptychs, though presented serially, are contrived so as to assemble themselves ultimately into a densely overwritten palimpsest." He frequently moved a single poem's mode from narration to meditation to an ode.

That's about 120 pages of densely overwritten Helen Vendler in a nutshell.

The Apprentice Mage, 1865-1914 (W.B. Yeats: A Life, Vol. 1)

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Informative biography of a complicated man
The Lighthouse and the Anteater
Surprises!
The Definitive Yeats Biography

The Apprentice Mage, 1865-1914 (W.B. Yeats: A Life, Vol. 1)
R. F. Foster
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0192117351

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There are several biographies of the great Irish poet to choose from, and the one you'll prefer depends on how much biography you want. Subtitled "The Apprentice Mage, 1865-1914," this is the one for completists (though they'll have to wait for Volume Two to get through Yeats's death in 1939). The author, a noted Irish historian, renders Yeats's life almost day to day, giving a particularly lively sense of the helter-skelter nature of his early years and a nice depiction of his tumultuous engagement with the Abbey Theatre.

Book Description

In the first authorized biography of W. B. Yeats for over fifty years, Roy Foster sheds new light on one of the most complex and fascinating lives of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Working from a great archive of personal and contemporary material, he dramatically alters traditional perceptions to illuminate the poet's family history, relationships, politics and art. From a childhood inheritance of declasse Irish Protestantism with strong nationalist sympathies, and an exceptional and talented family background, the narrative charts Yeats's development into an original and outstanding poet. It ends in his fiftieth year with the controversies and disillusionment affecting his personal and public life at the time of the First World War. A bohemian life of uncertain finances, love-affairs, avant-garde friends and experiments with drugs and occultism prefaces his attempt to unite politics with high culture and his creation of an Irish national theatre. Constantly shifting between Dublin, Coole Park and London, with forays to America and Paris, ruthlessly constructing a public life as well as a creative reputation, Yeats's genius attracted admirers and enemies with equal passion. His story intersects with those of an engrossing cast of characters including Lady Gregory, J. M. Synge, George Moore, `AE', Ezra Pound and above all Maud Gonne - an influence eternally re-created `like the phoenix', affecting almost everything he did. The search for supernatural wisdom forms a constant thread, traced through Yeats's occult notebooks and closely related to the insecurities of his personal life. The Apprentice Mage charts the growth of a poet's mind and of an astonishing personality, both of which were instrumental in the formation of a new and radicalized Irish nationalist identity.

Customer Reviews:

Informative biography of a complicated man.......2004-03-01

William Butler Yeats offers a life of contradictions. Born in Dublin to a middle-class Protestant family, Yeats went on to become one of the premier poets of the twentieth century. As a writer and member of the Irish literary community, he also helped to forge Irish national identity through his words and his deeds. In this biography, the first of two volumes, Roy Foster offers an account of Yeats' development into one of the leading figures of the Irish literary scene.

This is not an easy book. Foster recounts Yeats' life in what is sometimes excruciating detail, covering every movement and literary battle the poet undertakes. Moreover, as he does so he assumes the reader's familiarity with both the background of late nineteenth century Ireland and the members of the Irish literary community. People appear in his narrative with little introduction, creating a confusing jumble of names that limits the appreciation of their role in Yeats' life.

Such problems aside, this is a first-rate biography. Foster does a great job examining Yeats' life, in a text that while long is never dense. His coverage of Yeats' occult interests is particularly good, as is that of the poet's involvement in nationalist causes - both integral aspects of his poetry. Foster's argument that Yeats' involvement in the mystical was a reaction to the declining position of Protestants in Ireland, an effort to cope with the sense of dislocation by asserting psychic control, is a compelling one that helps to fit more of his poetry into its contemporary context. Foster helps this process; while he asserts that his biography is about what Yeats did rather than what the poet wrote he does offer a perceptive commentary on aspects of Yeats' work, which helps us better appreciate the connection between the man and his writings. Thanks to this, we have a book that is essential for understanding such a complicated literary figure and the role he played in his times.

The Lighthouse and the Anteater.......2003-05-02

For the first 100 pages or so, this book had me completely. Roy Foster writes with elegant brio and has a historian's eye for the wider events and contexts that shaped Yeats's early years. Where previous biographers like Ellman take a sort of lighthouse approach to their subject, treating the passions and conflicts of Yeats's day as fuel for the poetry that was destined to outshine them, Foster is more like an anteater, eagerly snuffling up the everyday bits of information that give the flavor of Yeats's multifaceted life as he actually lived it, before his later fame and incessant revisions smoothed it into a pattern.

After a while though, the book tends to bury Yeats in a mass of trivia that include everything from the menu at one of his literary dinners to the prices he charged for his lectures. This level of detail could be enlightening if Foster stopped for breath more often to tell us why these things are important. Too often though he keeps his head firmly down with the ants, cataloging the day-to-day intrigues of a very complicated life without linking them to any kind of larger interpretation of Yeats's personality or development. Instead, Foster spends his 500+ pages introducing new names at the rate of one or so per page, most of them disappearing by the end of the chapter never to be heard from again. We get the intrigues of various Irish nationalist factions, potted bios of minor figures on the Dublin and London art scenes, humorous sketches of Yeats's fellow-travellers in his sundry mystical societies. It was hard to see Yeats after a while with all these minor figures crowding the stage.

If Foster does have an interpretation of his own, as far as I can tell it's a revisionist one. Where Ellman or Jeffaries saw Yeats's life as a drama of painful self-creation, Foster sends to see an ambitious man on the make, an aggressive networker who wasn't beyond bending the truth if it helped his own advancement. Even his life-long passion for Maud Gonne, one of the key sources of his poetry, was, according to Foster, in part a self-conscious realization that a great poet needed a great passion to write about. In trying to bring Yeats back down to earth, I think Foster overcompensates by making him more canny and worldly than the sexual naivete, table rapping, faery talk and aesthetic posturing of these years suggest. Worst of all, Foster shows almost no interest in Yeats's poetry, the reason we're reading the biography in the first place. I put down the book admiring Foster's energy and mastery of such a huge anthill of facts, but I couldn't shake the feeling that a lot less would have told us a lot more.

Surprises!.......2001-07-04

This is loaded with surprise after surprise. Foster's insights into the poetry, through historical and social readings, are often revelatory. My only complaint is that many of the tales he tells tend to have the same emotional architecture due to a descirptive repetition: this makes it a little monotonous at times. But this is a quibble. This book is great. When is Vol. 2 going to be published?

The Definitive Yeats Biography.......1999-12-12

R.F. Foster's two-volume biography (second volume to come in 2000) is a model of articulate and knowledgable scholarship, arguably comparable to the great biographies of Joyce and Wilde written by Richard Ellman. Foster's work leaves nothing to be desired. It easily excels previous Yeats biographies written by Cootes, Jeffares, etc.

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