Reviews for Yeats Reader: A Portable Compendium of Poetry, Drama, and Prose

The average rating for Yeats Reader: A Portable Compendium of Poetry, Drama, and Prose based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-04-28 00:00:00 Pradeep Salian I have enjoyed the poetry of William Butler Yeats for many years as evidenced by my well-worn copy of his Complete Poems. But there is more to enjoy when considering this protean author for throughout his long life, William Butler Yeats produced important works in every literary genre, works of astonishing range, energy, erudition, beauty, and skill. His early poetry is memorable and moving. His poems and plays of middle age address the human condition with language that has entered our vocabulary for cataclysmic personal and world events. "O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance?" ("Among School Children", p 105) The writings of his final years offer wisdom, courage, humor, and sheer technical virtuosity. T. S. Eliot pronounced Yeats "the greatest poet of our time -- certainly the greatest in this language, and so far as I am able to judge, in any language" and "one of the 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." The Yeats Reader is a comprehensive single volume that demonstrates the full range of Yeats's talents. It presents more than one hundred and fifty of his best-known poems plus eight plays, a sampling of his prose tales, and excerpts from his published autobiographical and critical writings. In addition, an appendix offers six early texts of poems that Yeats later revised. Also included are selections from the memoirs left unpublished at his death and complete introductions written for a projected collection that never came to fruition. These are supplemented by unobtrusive annotation and a chronology of the life. Yeats was a protean writer and thinker, and few writers so thoroughly reward a reader's efforts to essay the whole of their canon. This volume is an excellent place to begin that enterprise, to renew an old acquaintance with one of world literature's great voices, or to continue a lifelong interest in the phenomenon of literary genius.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-12-22 00:00:00 ktqxqtcy catuiile Good volume for accessing the bulk of Yeats' most famous poetry while also dabbling in his non-fiction prose. The critical and autobiographical writings are at times beautiful and profound, and even when more mundane, remain amusing points of access into better understanding Yeats' mind. Because what an extraordinary mind it is! His belief in the mystical and convictions regarding poetry, symbols, language, tradition, myth, Ireland, etc are wonderful. He somehow combines a wide-eyed naivete with an artistic intelligence that makes the ideas compelling enough to be taken seriously. At times I wonder if some of his writings about symbolism are similar to something like Northrop Frye's in that they actually seem to provide insight into technical/philosophical issues. It's something I would like to believe but unfortunately feel like I would need to examine more critically. Yeats' poetry was a revelation. I enjoy the antiquated diction and the poetic sincerity of most of his earlier work, but it is the later stuff (starting with A Vision and summiting in The Tower) his voice started having that distinctive ring that is characteristic of great poetry. I don't know what it is that allows certain lines to suddenly reverberate with beauty and power, part of it is about figuring out how to read the poet, but Yeats' later stuff abounds with such moments. His symbols fall in the perfect bandwidth between abstract and concrete, presenting images that can be linked together and formed into a sense, but resisting any too structured form that would limit their mystery. I need to return to his work to continue to get a better appreciation of it because already "The Second Coming," "Coming to Byzantium," "Byzantium," and "The Tower" have secured a place in that temple of the greatest poems I've encountered.