Reviews for Yeats' Poetry and Prose

The average rating for Yeats' Poetry and Prose based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-11-10 00:00:00 Dawn Alvarez For the selections I read, I would give this collection about a 3.5, but looking at it as an entire overview of Yeat's major works along with critical background I went with 4 stars rather than 3. I am a big fan of Norton critical editions (I've been a Norton supporter since undergrad), because they tend to pull together a lot of interesting and relevant background and critical material in addition to some of the most important and influential texts in the field of English lit. As far as the Yeats collection goes, I like Yeats, but I am not a huge poetry fan. I think poetry requires a way of thinking that I'm simply not that accustomed to from reading plays and novels. Some of the poems here I love--"The Second Coming," "September, 1916," for instance--but then others simply didn't do anything for me. I think a lot of the poems, especially those written to or about Maude Gonne, required a much more detailed background knowledge than I have (or the editors hinted at) in order to understand the allusions. With the plays (much more my line), I like them, but Yeats was fundamentally not a playwright. As with a number of poets who also wrote plays (see T.S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral), some of Yeat's plays sound more like poems with staging than actual plays. "On Baile's Strand," for instance, requires a lot of exposition, which means the entire opening section involves fairly little action. On the other hand, "Cathleen ni Houlihan" is an awesome play.

Review # 2 was written on 2008-10-07 00:00:00 Ray Varnadore It's Yeats. I had the help of a professor to get me through this volume, thankfully, because you need to know a lot about Irish history and Yeats' philosophy to even barely understand his poetry. I was reminded of one of my favorite Yeats poems recently when I read it in "The Lake of Dead Languages" by Goodman. Here's the last stanza: "I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey, I hear it in the deep heart's core."