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Summary: The intesity of W.B. Yeats
Review: "Art has, I beleive, always gained in intensity by limitation."Yeats was the great poet of the 20th century... For what makes Yeats a great poet is how alive he is at every moment, how vital and unpronouncement-like his poetry is. He tried to write a "dyed and figured mystery" into each of his poems, and he captured the colors and people of life more vividly than any poet since Shakespeare... It could have been written yesterday - and would have captured our world exactly. Yeats speaks to each us anew, every time we read him. He knows that the world we live in, no matter what the time and place, is always filled with evil doers who are filled with passionate intensity, and that the world seems about to slip into a chaotic nightmare...
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Summary: Fall in love...
Review: All I can say is fall in love with her, read her "He Wishes For The Cloths Of Heaven" and she will be yours.
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Summary: IRISH GENIUS WITH WORLDWIDE, POSTHUMOUS APPEAL
Review: Before a reasoned, intelligent assessment of Yeats (or any other master poet such as Hardy, Frost,de la Mare, Wilbur, et al) can be made, one must ask the right preliminary question: What is Genius-level poetry? There are at least 6 primary components: 1)It withholds something from us at first, yielding its secrets slowly, like an attractive lover or an ocean (sand, shoreline, shallows, surfzone, shelf, offshore, blue depths);2)It surprises and satisfies simultaneously - it repays multiple re-readings: 'I knew that but I didn't know until now that I knew it'; 3) It is words set to life's music - it sounds, or sings, special, through appropriate rhythm and rhyme. Follow the music and the other senses follow along; follow the voice til you have no choice; 4)It is memorable, both in detailed words, metaphors, images, literary referents, phrasings, lines, sections/stanzas, and as a sum of things which exceeds the excellencies of the parts. It is memorizable. 5)It speaks to life's questions: what could be worse than answering questions no one is asking?; above all relevance synthesizes with reverence to create resonance. Its subject matter matters. Nothing is missing more in most poetry published today than lack of compression, resolution, depth: too much verse is a pretty pond acres wide, inches deep. Especially powerful verse has simplicity in perichoresis (interpenetration) with complexity or multiplicity, ambidextrously able to use telescope or microscope to bring the subject into focus for the reader. The best of Seuss appeals also to adults; the arcanest of Einstein, E=mc2, can even be grasped by children;Lastly,6) It fulfills its expectations and arrives: it reaches the reader at some point, in different ways at different times. Though woods are lovely, dark and deep;with miles to go before I sleep, there are still promises to keep. Yeats lovers will find all six of these criteria fulfilled consistently throughout the Collected Works; skeptics and seekers can objectively test Irish Airman Predicts His Death; Sailing to Byzantium; Song of Wandering Aengus; Innisfree and other typically anthologized masterpieces to see if they meet at least 4 of the 6 standards. I hope many new readers are pleasantly surprised and many old friends of Yeats come away with a new appreciation of what Ireland gave the world from 1865-1939. His 1923 Nobel Prize was not bestowed by biased eyes, but the award was nobly earned, though by so many undiscerned.
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Summary: Worth the time.
Review: I began reading Yeat's collected poems twenty-five years ago and still turn to them regularly. The best ones do not fade with time but provide increasing enjoyment.
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Summary: I envy all newcomers
Review: I envy anyone reading this who has yet to discover Yeats but wants to. One of my college professors said the same thing to me, and I still remember what it was like to fall under the spell of Yeats' language and his romanticism. (But hey, if Sodom120--from Louisiana, no less--says these poems are "mediocre," then what do I, the worldwide poetry-reading public, generations of succeeding poets, and the Nobel committee know?)
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Summary: I envy all newcomers
Review: I envy anyone reading this who has yet to discover Yeats but wants to. One of my college professors said the same thing to me, and I still remember what it was like to fall under the spell of Yeats' language and his romanticism. (But hey, if Sodom120--from Louisiana, no less--says these poems are "mediocre," then what do I, the worldwide poetry-reading public, generations of succeeding poets, and the Nobel committee know?)
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Summary: Yeats's Second Coming
Review: 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.
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Summary: The mastery of the most influential poet of this century
Review: It is hard to dispute Yeats' status as the most influential poet in the 20th century. His wit and articulate voice covers almost every facet of our society today. This book simply presents W.B. in all of his glory, allowing the reader to view every poem simply and purely, as they were intended to be seen.
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Summary: w.b. yeats
Review: The woods of Arcady are dead. So too are the kings of old, and yeats, and tennyson, and chesterton. Yeats' poetry displays a sense of a man writing out of inferiority, introspection, and self-hate. Yet, through it all, lies a somewhat simple quaint beauty of language, which does not begin to compete with the likes of, for example, campion, or poe, or other poet songtasters, but still holds its own. Other than Leda and the Swan, most of his poems are rather accessible, and dry for the passionate english scholars and post modern pseudoclassicists. Howevever, compared with today's trash, i.e. maya angelou, or the like, yeats stands atop ben nevis' bottom, and thrice the size of a fourth of wales.
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Summary: A good edition of a great poet
Review: There isn't much question whether Yeats was a great poet, just where on the all time great list he falls. Whether you call him the greatest poet of the 20th century, or the greatest since Wordsworth, Milton or Shakespeare, his accomplishments are clear. Beyond that, why should anyone buy this edition as opposed to any of the other available? First, the collected poems gives you a sense of his development and interests, not just the highlights of his greates poems. Second, and more importantly, this edition is well-annotated. The notes are thorough without being unduly interpretive--they tell you what an allusion refers to, not how it affects the meaning of the poem. The notes aim to be useful to any reader, regardless of background. As a result, western readers will come across odd sounding notes such as "Jesus Christ is the founder of Christianity" or "Hamlet is the hero of William Shakespeare's tragedy of the same name." Still, you'll be thankful for such prosaic entries as they explain Irish myth and locate historical allusions. All in all, it's an edition that belongs on any poetry lover's shelf.
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