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Selected Poems and Two Plays
The Selected Poems of William Butler Yeats brings together sixty-one poems by the most widely read and widely admired of all modern poets who have written in English. Here are many of his greatest poems including The Lake Isle of Innisfree, The Sorrow of Love, The Stolen Child, The Secret Rose, No Second Troy, and The Magi. These are poems filled with passion-the passion of love, the passion of the soul, and the passion of creativity. Every poem speaks from the heart, for Yeats is first and foremost a poet of the human heart, and nowhere can we find better proof of this fact than in the poems selected for this volume.
236 pages, Paperback
First published February 1, 1962
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About the author
W.B. Yeats
1,977 books2,541 followersWilliam Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and dramatist, and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years Yeats served as an Irish Senator for two terms. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival, and along with Lady Gregory and Edward Martyn founded the Abbey Theatre, serving as its chief during its early years. In 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for what the Nobel Committee described as "inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation." He was the first Irishman so honored. Yeats is generally considered one of the few writers who completed their greatest works after being awarded the Nobel Prize; such works include The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1929).
Yeats was born and educated in Dublin but spent his childhood in County Sligo. He studied poetry in his youth, and from an early age was fascinated by both Irish legends and the occult. Those topics feature in the first phase of his work, which lasted roughly until the turn of the century. His earliest volume of verse was published in 1889, and those slow paced and lyrical poems display debts to Edmund Spenser and Percy Bysshe Shelley, as well as to the Pre-Raphaelite poets. From 1900, Yeats' poetry grew more physical and realistic. He largely renounced the transcendental beliefs of his youth, though he remained preoccupied with physical and spiritual masks, as well as with cyclical theories of life.
--from Wikipedia
Yeats was born and educated in Dublin but spent his childhood in County Sligo. He studied poetry in his youth, and from an early age was fascinated by both Irish legends and the occult. Those topics feature in the first phase of his work, which lasted roughly until the turn of the century. His earliest volume of verse was published in 1889, and those slow paced and lyrical poems display debts to Edmund Spenser and Percy Bysshe Shelley, as well as to the Pre-Raphaelite poets. From 1900, Yeats' poetry grew more physical and realistic. He largely renounced the transcendental beliefs of his youth, though he remained preoccupied with physical and spiritual masks, as well as with cyclical theories of life.
--from Wikipedia
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
March 17, 2023
One hundred and ninety-five poem spanning forty years, and what a congregation of wonders they are! It nearly overwhelms one, this attempt to encapsulate all this variety between two covers.
Yeats earliest poems focused on legends of Ireland. Slow and lyrical, these early works have hints of the Pre-Raphaelites about them. Cuchulain’s Fight With The Sea, a poem of the aging hero taking out his grief on the relentless waves after unknowingly killing his own son is among the most powerful of these:
Cuchulain stirred,
Stared on the horses of the sea, and heard
The cars of battle and his own name cried;
And fought with the invulnerable tide.
In this early period, Yeats also wrote brilliant, shorter poems of love lost and found. Poems such as When You Are Old, written to mourn a love that never was, or A Drinking Song, a six line celebration of love and attraction, are unforgettable, easily committed to memory.
~A Drinking Song~
Wine comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
That’s all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
I raise the glass to my mouth,
I look at you and I sigh.
His middle period saw him move away from the heroes and myths of the Irish Twilight. Poems from this time often reflected the politics of his Irish Nationalism. The greatest of these, (and my favorite) is Easter 1916, his tribute to the failed Irish Uprising and its martyrs. One needs not be an Irish Nationalist to feel the power of this work — I’m never able to read it through without mist in my eyes and a hitch in my voice, particularly when reaching its ringing, final lines:
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse —
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly;
A terrible beauty is born.
His later poetry closes the circle of his life. They reflect a personalize occult mythology and spirituality that tastes of his early mythological poems. Sailing To Byzantium is among the most famous of these, though my personal favorite is The Second Coming, a dark, apocalyptic poem that launched this period, with menacing and memorable imagery:
A shape with lions body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
The expansive genius enclosed in this volume is nearly overwhelming. Don’t try to take it all in at once. Consume it slowly. Savor it. And be amazed.
Yeats earliest poems focused on legends of Ireland. Slow and lyrical, these early works have hints of the Pre-Raphaelites about them. Cuchulain’s Fight With The Sea, a poem of the aging hero taking out his grief on the relentless waves after unknowingly killing his own son is among the most powerful of these:
Cuchulain stirred,
Stared on the horses of the sea, and heard
The cars of battle and his own name cried;
And fought with the invulnerable tide.
In this early period, Yeats also wrote brilliant, shorter poems of love lost and found. Poems such as When You Are Old, written to mourn a love that never was, or A Drinking Song, a six line celebration of love and attraction, are unforgettable, easily committed to memory.
~A Drinking Song~
Wine comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
That’s all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
I raise the glass to my mouth,
I look at you and I sigh.
His middle period saw him move away from the heroes and myths of the Irish Twilight. Poems from this time often reflected the politics of his Irish Nationalism. The greatest of these, (and my favorite) is Easter 1916, his tribute to the failed Irish Uprising and its martyrs. One needs not be an Irish Nationalist to feel the power of this work — I’m never able to read it through without mist in my eyes and a hitch in my voice, particularly when reaching its ringing, final lines:
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse —
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly;
A terrible beauty is born.
His later poetry closes the circle of his life. They reflect a personalize occult mythology and spirituality that tastes of his early mythological poems. Sailing To Byzantium is among the most famous of these, though my personal favorite is The Second Coming, a dark, apocalyptic poem that launched this period, with menacing and memorable imagery:
A shape with lions body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
The expansive genius enclosed in this volume is nearly overwhelming. Don’t try to take it all in at once. Consume it slowly. Savor it. And be amazed.
March 17, 2023
William Butler Yeats, for me, *is* poetry – and I don’t think that I’m just saying that because my ancestry is three-fourths Irish. Rather, it is the sheer musicality of his language, the variety of the poetic modes in which he composes, that causes Yeats to stand out, for me, above all other poets. And it is for all of these reasons that I turned with particular pleasure to this 1962 collection with the straightforward title of Selected Poems and Two Plays of William Butler Yeats.
Yeats, of course, is renowned as a leading figure within literary High Modernism generally, and within the Irish Literary Revival of the late 19th and early 20th century specifically. Working partly in terms of his own elaborate personal mythology, and partly in terms of the Irish cultural and historical background within which he grew up, Yeats crafted poetry that is specific to its place and time, and that at the same time is universal, capturing the thoughts, fears, hopes, and yearnings of all people in all times. His poetry is specific to Ireland, and is applicable to the entire world.
The introduction and glossing by Yeats scholar M.L. Rosenthal of New York University helped me to see new dimensions in Yeats poems that were already familiar to me. One of my favourite works by Yeats, for instance, is “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” (1919). This World War I-era poem captures well the paradoxical situation that might face an airman from Ireland who chose to enlist in Great Britain’s Royal Air Force – a part of the British military that had oppressed Ireland for centuries – and to fight against Germans toward whom the poem’s speaker feels no personal hostility: “Those that I fight I do not hate,/Those that I guard I do not love” (p. 55).
Yet it was from Rosenthal’s notes that I learned that Yeats’s poem was not solely an act of pure poetic imagination: rather, it was written in response to the death of Major Robert Gregory (1881-1918), the only child of Isabella Augusta, Lady Gregory – a dramatist who drew upon Irish mythology in crafting her work, and who with Yeats co-founded the Abbey Theatre and the Irish Literary Theatre. The references in the poem to Kiltartan, a village near Lady Gregory’s estate in County Galway (“My country is Kiltartan Cross,/My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor”), reinforce these features of the poem. And this knowledge gave new significance to those lines from the poem in which Yeats imagines what might have caused this young man to go into a war in which he did not necessarily have any stake:
Nor law, nor duty made me fight,
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds…. (p. 56)
When the First World War began, Robert Gregory was 34 years old, married, with three children. He had, in short, plenty of perfectly valid reasons to stay home, and yet he went to the war and died in it. It seems clear that Yeats, observing Lady Gregory’s grief at the death of her only son, thought long and hard about what might have driven Robert Gregory toward deciding that “The years to come seemed waste of breath…In balance with this life, this death” (p. 56).
There are, of course, the poems of W.B. Yeats that are canonical – the poems without which no poetry anthology is complete: “Easter 1916”; “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”; “Leda and the Swan”; “Sailing to Byzantium”; “The Second Coming.” And yet, for me, part of the pleasure of reading this volume inhered in reading poems that were new to me, and that captured Yeats’s poetic sensibility and his thematic concerns just as well as those more famous works.
I liked, for instance, his “Meditations in Time of Civil War,” a poem set at an isolated tower home much like Thoor Ballylee, the old Anglo-Norman tower in County Galway where Yeats made a home for himself and his family. The time is the Irish Civil War of 1922-23, when, in the aftermath of a treaty that provided for an Irish Free State that would no longer be under British control, forces of Ireland’s Free State provisional government fought Irish Republican Army rebels who opposed the treaty. In the poem, the speaker at his old tower is visited by fighters from both sides. First comes an IRA rebel:
An affable Irregular,
A heavily-built Falstaffian man,
Comes cracking jokes of civil war
As though to die by gunshot were
The finest play under the sun.
Then follows a visit from some of the Free State government forces:
A brown Lieutenant and his men,
Half dressed in national uniform,
Stand at my door, and I complain
Of the foul weather, hail and rain,
A pear-tree broken by the storm. (p. 106)
The ordinary, human, quotidian quality of these interactions somehow re-emphasizes the peculiar horrors of civil war, looking ahead to the narrator’s later observations of how “Last night they trundled down the road/That dead young soldier in his blood”, and his final reflections about how “We had fed the heart on fantasies,/The heart’s grown brutal from the fare” (p. 107). These lines made me think of Yeats in “Easter 1916” observing the tragic complexity of the violent beginnings of a new Irish nation: “Too long a sacrifice/Can make a stone of the heart.”
Yeats’s synthesis of the materials of the mythic Irish past with his own elaborate personal mythology can be quite challenging to access and understand. It is for that reason that I was most grateful to editor and commentator Rosenthal when I was reading poems like “Ribh at the Tomb of Baile and Aillinn.” When Ribh, the speaker, declares that “Of Baile and Aillinn you need not speak,/All know their tale” (p. 154), I was glad to be able to flip back to Rosenthal’s extensive notes and learn that Ribh is a prophetic hermit – a “Fictitious character invented by Yeats as a mystical spokesman, a critic of Christian orthodoxy” (p. 228). As for Baile and Aillinn, they were a legendary prince and princess who, according to notes by Yeats, “were lovers, but Aengus, the Master of Love, wishing them to be happy in his own land among the dead, told to each a story of the other’s death, so that their hearts were broken and they died” (p. 223).
Knowing the details of this Romeo and Juliet-style tragic love story that Yeats drew out of the mists of Irish mythology gave new resonance to Ribh’s description of how the lovers’ eternal union is symbolized by the apple and yew trees that have grown intertwined over their tomb:
The miracle that gave them such a death
Transfigured to pure substance what had once
Been bone and sinew; when such bodies join
There is no touching here, no touching there,
Nor straining joy, but whole is joined to whole….
Here on the anniversary of their death,
The anniversary of their first embrace,
Those lovers, purified by tragedy,
Hurry into each other’s arms…. (pp. 154-55)
And the solitary, ascetic Ribh talks of how he is touched and moved by this story of two people’s undying love, noting that “these eyes,/By water, herb, and solitary prayer/Made aquiline, are open to that light” (p. 155).
Rosenthal even includes in this volume a couple of Yeats’s less-well-known verse dramas, such as Calvary (1921), in which the dramatis personae – including Christ Himself, along with Judas Iscariot, Lazarus, and three Roman soldiers – wear masks like the actors in classical Athenian drama. Yeats’s unconventional attitude toward the Christian faith that figures so large in Irish life and culture comes through with singular power.
Lazarus, reminded by Christ of how Christ brought him back from the dead, sounds resentful, describing how “I was lying still/In an old comfortable mountain cavern/When you came climbing there with a great crowd/And dragged me to the light.” Reminded by Christ that “I gave you life”, Lazarus retorts that “death is what I ask./Alive I never could escape your love” (p. 196).
Similarly, Judas states that the idea of Christ’s absolute, divine power over the world was what drove him to betray Christ: “That was the very thought that drove me wild./I could not bear to think you had but to whistle/And I must do; but after that I thought,/'Whatever man betrays Him will be free';/And life grew bearable again” (p. 198).
And Christ’s final act of sacrifice on the cross, His cry of “My Father, why hast Thou forsaken me?” (p. 200), seems anything but redemptive – indeed, goes all but unnoticed – as the Roman soldiers take a break from their dice-throwing to dance around the cross, and three musicians play a “Song for the folding and unfolding of the cloth”, while one of the musicians states repeatedly that “God has not appeared to the birds” (p. 201).
To call William Butler Yeats’s work challenging would be an understatement. Each time I read his work, I have a renewed sense that I am, at best, barely scratching the surface of the multiple depths of meaning to be found in his poetry. At the same time, however, the poems are so absolutely perfect in their lyricism and musicality that I know I will read them again and again, exulting in the beauty of their language and hoping that I will come to understand more of their meaning.
I visited Thoor Ballylee once, and stood for a time before Yeats’s grave, reading the lines from "Under Ben Bulben" that are inscribed on his tombstone: “Cast a cold eye/On life, on death./Horseman, pass by!” I will pass by, Mr. Yeats, and will return from time to time to visit with you and hear the magic of your quintessentially Irish voice – and I am most grateful to have the opportunity to do so.
Yeats, of course, is renowned as a leading figure within literary High Modernism generally, and within the Irish Literary Revival of the late 19th and early 20th century specifically. Working partly in terms of his own elaborate personal mythology, and partly in terms of the Irish cultural and historical background within which he grew up, Yeats crafted poetry that is specific to its place and time, and that at the same time is universal, capturing the thoughts, fears, hopes, and yearnings of all people in all times. His poetry is specific to Ireland, and is applicable to the entire world.
The introduction and glossing by Yeats scholar M.L. Rosenthal of New York University helped me to see new dimensions in Yeats poems that were already familiar to me. One of my favourite works by Yeats, for instance, is “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” (1919). This World War I-era poem captures well the paradoxical situation that might face an airman from Ireland who chose to enlist in Great Britain’s Royal Air Force – a part of the British military that had oppressed Ireland for centuries – and to fight against Germans toward whom the poem’s speaker feels no personal hostility: “Those that I fight I do not hate,/Those that I guard I do not love” (p. 55).
Yet it was from Rosenthal’s notes that I learned that Yeats’s poem was not solely an act of pure poetic imagination: rather, it was written in response to the death of Major Robert Gregory (1881-1918), the only child of Isabella Augusta, Lady Gregory – a dramatist who drew upon Irish mythology in crafting her work, and who with Yeats co-founded the Abbey Theatre and the Irish Literary Theatre. The references in the poem to Kiltartan, a village near Lady Gregory’s estate in County Galway (“My country is Kiltartan Cross,/My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor”), reinforce these features of the poem. And this knowledge gave new significance to those lines from the poem in which Yeats imagines what might have caused this young man to go into a war in which he did not necessarily have any stake:
Nor law, nor duty made me fight,
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds…. (p. 56)
When the First World War began, Robert Gregory was 34 years old, married, with three children. He had, in short, plenty of perfectly valid reasons to stay home, and yet he went to the war and died in it. It seems clear that Yeats, observing Lady Gregory’s grief at the death of her only son, thought long and hard about what might have driven Robert Gregory toward deciding that “The years to come seemed waste of breath…In balance with this life, this death” (p. 56).
There are, of course, the poems of W.B. Yeats that are canonical – the poems without which no poetry anthology is complete: “Easter 1916”; “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”; “Leda and the Swan”; “Sailing to Byzantium”; “The Second Coming.” And yet, for me, part of the pleasure of reading this volume inhered in reading poems that were new to me, and that captured Yeats’s poetic sensibility and his thematic concerns just as well as those more famous works.
I liked, for instance, his “Meditations in Time of Civil War,” a poem set at an isolated tower home much like Thoor Ballylee, the old Anglo-Norman tower in County Galway where Yeats made a home for himself and his family. The time is the Irish Civil War of 1922-23, when, in the aftermath of a treaty that provided for an Irish Free State that would no longer be under British control, forces of Ireland’s Free State provisional government fought Irish Republican Army rebels who opposed the treaty. In the poem, the speaker at his old tower is visited by fighters from both sides. First comes an IRA rebel:
An affable Irregular,
A heavily-built Falstaffian man,
Comes cracking jokes of civil war
As though to die by gunshot were
The finest play under the sun.
Then follows a visit from some of the Free State government forces:
A brown Lieutenant and his men,
Half dressed in national uniform,
Stand at my door, and I complain
Of the foul weather, hail and rain,
A pear-tree broken by the storm. (p. 106)
The ordinary, human, quotidian quality of these interactions somehow re-emphasizes the peculiar horrors of civil war, looking ahead to the narrator’s later observations of how “Last night they trundled down the road/That dead young soldier in his blood”, and his final reflections about how “We had fed the heart on fantasies,/The heart’s grown brutal from the fare” (p. 107). These lines made me think of Yeats in “Easter 1916” observing the tragic complexity of the violent beginnings of a new Irish nation: “Too long a sacrifice/Can make a stone of the heart.”
Yeats’s synthesis of the materials of the mythic Irish past with his own elaborate personal mythology can be quite challenging to access and understand. It is for that reason that I was most grateful to editor and commentator Rosenthal when I was reading poems like “Ribh at the Tomb of Baile and Aillinn.” When Ribh, the speaker, declares that “Of Baile and Aillinn you need not speak,/All know their tale” (p. 154), I was glad to be able to flip back to Rosenthal’s extensive notes and learn that Ribh is a prophetic hermit – a “Fictitious character invented by Yeats as a mystical spokesman, a critic of Christian orthodoxy” (p. 228). As for Baile and Aillinn, they were a legendary prince and princess who, according to notes by Yeats, “were lovers, but Aengus, the Master of Love, wishing them to be happy in his own land among the dead, told to each a story of the other’s death, so that their hearts were broken and they died” (p. 223).
Knowing the details of this Romeo and Juliet-style tragic love story that Yeats drew out of the mists of Irish mythology gave new resonance to Ribh’s description of how the lovers’ eternal union is symbolized by the apple and yew trees that have grown intertwined over their tomb:
The miracle that gave them such a death
Transfigured to pure substance what had once
Been bone and sinew; when such bodies join
There is no touching here, no touching there,
Nor straining joy, but whole is joined to whole….
Here on the anniversary of their death,
The anniversary of their first embrace,
Those lovers, purified by tragedy,
Hurry into each other’s arms…. (pp. 154-55)
And the solitary, ascetic Ribh talks of how he is touched and moved by this story of two people’s undying love, noting that “these eyes,/By water, herb, and solitary prayer/Made aquiline, are open to that light” (p. 155).
Rosenthal even includes in this volume a couple of Yeats’s less-well-known verse dramas, such as Calvary (1921), in which the dramatis personae – including Christ Himself, along with Judas Iscariot, Lazarus, and three Roman soldiers – wear masks like the actors in classical Athenian drama. Yeats’s unconventional attitude toward the Christian faith that figures so large in Irish life and culture comes through with singular power.
Lazarus, reminded by Christ of how Christ brought him back from the dead, sounds resentful, describing how “I was lying still/In an old comfortable mountain cavern/When you came climbing there with a great crowd/And dragged me to the light.” Reminded by Christ that “I gave you life”, Lazarus retorts that “death is what I ask./Alive I never could escape your love” (p. 196).
Similarly, Judas states that the idea of Christ’s absolute, divine power over the world was what drove him to betray Christ: “That was the very thought that drove me wild./I could not bear to think you had but to whistle/And I must do; but after that I thought,/'Whatever man betrays Him will be free';/And life grew bearable again” (p. 198).
And Christ’s final act of sacrifice on the cross, His cry of “My Father, why hast Thou forsaken me?” (p. 200), seems anything but redemptive – indeed, goes all but unnoticed – as the Roman soldiers take a break from their dice-throwing to dance around the cross, and three musicians play a “Song for the folding and unfolding of the cloth”, while one of the musicians states repeatedly that “God has not appeared to the birds” (p. 201).
To call William Butler Yeats’s work challenging would be an understatement. Each time I read his work, I have a renewed sense that I am, at best, barely scratching the surface of the multiple depths of meaning to be found in his poetry. At the same time, however, the poems are so absolutely perfect in their lyricism and musicality that I know I will read them again and again, exulting in the beauty of their language and hoping that I will come to understand more of their meaning.
I visited Thoor Ballylee once, and stood for a time before Yeats’s grave, reading the lines from "Under Ben Bulben" that are inscribed on his tombstone: “Cast a cold eye/On life, on death./Horseman, pass by!” I will pass by, Mr. Yeats, and will return from time to time to visit with you and hear the magic of your quintessentially Irish voice – and I am most grateful to have the opportunity to do so.
March 18, 2009
I'll not deny that Yeats is a great poet, but I will say that a lot of his work went way over my head. As such, I would have appreciated a volume that helped me to decode his work more than this did.
That said, this appears to be a fairly comprehensive overview and introduction to the famous poet's work.
That said, this appears to be a fairly comprehensive overview and introduction to the famous poet's work.
December 3, 2022
I'm not one for poetry, but am aiming to read as many of the great poets as possible -- if not because I like them, because their legacy demonstrates that they deserve to be read.
While this book of Yeats' poetry was mostly boring for me, I found specific bits of his poems to be quite powerful. I also thoroughly enjoyed his play, "Calvary," where the Biblical figure of Judas takes on a whole different level of twisted (his character in the play more or less admits that his betrayal of Jesus was due to envy, so he committed the ultimate act that would exclude him from redemption, thus controlling his own destiny and "out-maneuvering" God).
Would I recommend this book? No, not really, but my opinion doesn't count much as someone who has little knowledge or appreciation of poetry. 2/5 stars.
While this book of Yeats' poetry was mostly boring for me, I found specific bits of his poems to be quite powerful. I also thoroughly enjoyed his play, "Calvary," where the Biblical figure of Judas takes on a whole different level of twisted (his character in the play more or less admits that his betrayal of Jesus was due to envy, so he committed the ultimate act that would exclude him from redemption, thus controlling his own destiny and "out-maneuvering" God).
Would I recommend this book? No, not really, but my opinion doesn't count much as someone who has little knowledge or appreciation of poetry. 2/5 stars.
July 2, 2022
A selection from one of the finest poets of the twentieth century. Yeats writes about Irish myth, contemporary Irish politics, morality, the relation of art to life, and, in his later work, poems based on a personal mythological system. These latter, including “The Second Coming,” “Sailing to Byzantium” and “Byzantium,” along with poems like “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” and “Lapis Lazuli,” are among his best.
Acquired 1993
The Word, Montreal, Quebec
Acquired 1993
The Word, Montreal, Quebec
November 10, 2018
I’ve had a dog-eared copy of this book as a constant companion since my undergrad English major days 25 years ago. It’s a go-to volume for me, I always keep it in reach so I can easily experience the work of one of the greatest writers of all time. Yeat’s work never gets old; as with any great work, you can glean new things every time you re-read these masterpieces as you move through life.
December 7, 2017
Weird guy. But man, really great stuff. I loved Ephemera, The Rose of the World, The Sorrow of Love, When You Are Old, Sailing to Byzantium, He Wishes For the Cloths of Heaven, and A Drinking Song. Although, I'm not sure what all the racket is about concerning "The Lake Isle of Innisfree."
August 20, 2023
Given his outsize reputation in English letters, my inability to appreciate the poetry of Yeats feels like some sort of personal failure. I guess I'll just have to accept that situation, since many of these poems simply reflect a different age, when concerns like religion and Irish nationalism loomed large. To a contemporary reader like myself, it all just seems so dated and dull.
Nonetheless, there are a few worthwhile verses in these pages, chief among them "Upon a Dying Lady", "Towards Break of Day", and "The Second Coming". But beyond that, most of the contents of this volume just did nothing at all for me as a reader.
Nonetheless, there are a few worthwhile verses in these pages, chief among them "Upon a Dying Lady", "Towards Break of Day", and "The Second Coming". But beyond that, most of the contents of this volume just did nothing at all for me as a reader.
March 10, 2019
He lingered on old age with a bitterness that belied the beauty of his poetry
February 7, 2024
live laugh love WB YEATS
December 2, 2023
It won't end, the dreary drilling insistence of daily life; it won't even wax new, and if not drilled by the drear then drilled by the monotonousnesss of it: a taunt on one's patience. It is from a point of boredom, of, well, of boredom, that I return to the little red book of Yeats; to see what's the deal, if ever a deal there was, what's it now, what; for, assailed, assaulted, almost assassinated by all of that dreariness, one either jumps into a river or gets, or tries to, at least, to the bottom of something; of anything. What-ever. When one's got to move on then movement is a necessity, no matter where towards, for even movement for movement's sake is movement still, anyway, and so again I read this book of poems, songs, and so on, in an attempt to move in some way, for movement is movement, no matter if there's actual movement, so long as movement is implied, or intended. I move in a manner of speaking. Therefore, Yeats.
Because, dear, I have no way of calming the heart, and it is restless with a certain obscure and urgent longing, a certain wailing, a certain wish-wash wanting, I don't know, and the evenings look vaguely to my now-weary eyes like mornings, and the mornings as weary as evenings, and in the very air a certain spurious stench, as of semen laced with liquor, forgive me, and a certain, a certain . . . . well, the air is just stiff around and about, and the minute hand seems to have stopped at seven. And it hurts too much to jump, be it from bridges or roofs or beds or trees, be it from moving vehicles or from crags: it's "a curse and a care": what's the source of the malaise? And it hurts no one thus to jump, simply—if metaphorically—into a book: a book of poems, no less, a book of poems by William Butler Yeats, no less no less. It hurts no one. And so I jump.
And, having so settled into movement, into more or less movement, it is not a surprise that the minute hand has progressed, it has moves on towards God knows where, onto other sevens, and it is no longer today, hopefully we are further on, hopefully we are moving, hopefully, but the illusion seems to have escaped too, and the cold that froze the minute hand has gone out the window, if there's a window, and the air has started moving too, in that same spirit, and it turns out the stences were imagined, either that or they too, like the cold that froze the— you get the idea.
And I read again the poems of William Butler Yeats, out loud to the wasps and the geckos, to the shelves of dusty books, to the dim light of the room. Yeats Yeats Yeats, the Irishman who foresaw the despair that hasn't yet gone, that hasn't truly even arrived yet. Yeats. In your orisons be all my sorrows — remembered.
Because, dear, I have no way of calming the heart, and it is restless with a certain obscure and urgent longing, a certain wailing, a certain wish-wash wanting, I don't know, and the evenings look vaguely to my now-weary eyes like mornings, and the mornings as weary as evenings, and in the very air a certain spurious stench, as of semen laced with liquor, forgive me, and a certain, a certain . . . . well, the air is just stiff around and about, and the minute hand seems to have stopped at seven. And it hurts too much to jump, be it from bridges or roofs or beds or trees, be it from moving vehicles or from crags: it's "a curse and a care": what's the source of the malaise? And it hurts no one thus to jump, simply—if metaphorically—into a book: a book of poems, no less, a book of poems by William Butler Yeats, no less no less. It hurts no one. And so I jump.
And, having so settled into movement, into more or less movement, it is not a surprise that the minute hand has progressed, it has moves on towards God knows where, onto other sevens, and it is no longer today, hopefully we are further on, hopefully we are moving, hopefully, but the illusion seems to have escaped too, and the cold that froze the minute hand has gone out the window, if there's a window, and the air has started moving too, in that same spirit, and it turns out the stences were imagined, either that or they too, like the cold that froze the— you get the idea.
And I read again the poems of William Butler Yeats, out loud to the wasps and the geckos, to the shelves of dusty books, to the dim light of the room. Yeats Yeats Yeats, the Irishman who foresaw the despair that hasn't yet gone, that hasn't truly even arrived yet. Yeats. In your orisons be all my sorrows — remembered.
March 26, 2019
Yeats’ speaks with a more moving and emotionally engaging voice about the middle of his long writing career in 1914-15 with poems like the short “A Coat”, “The Magi”, and the powerful “Easter 1916” about the failed Irish revolt whose participants were all but one executed. The memorable chorus “A terrible beauty is born” suggests that Yeats is speaking with a new and more powerful voice. It begins a stage in his career when his even more powerful and disturbing poems will come out such as “The Second Coming” that sees something bestial coming around a full circle. Yeats uses symmetry of the millenniums. Looking back at the terrible past two thousand years he fears the future two thousand. There is beauty, violence, suffering, and grotesque elements in “Leda and the Swan”. The “terrible beauty” here is the violence of history.
In the late “Sailing to Byzantium” the soul celebrates its achievements as it sees the body deteriorate.
Yeats defends aristocratic culture and is anti-modernist to that extent. This especially evident in “A Prayer for My Daughter”.
There are other main concerns that project in his poems, a certain Maud Gonne who in “A Dialogue of Self and Soul” he writes:
. . . that most fecund ditch of all
The folly that man does
Or must suffer, if he woos
A proud woman in kindred to his soul
The other concern is the “gyres” and his occultism. It attracted the attention even in clinical neuropsychology. Professor Robert Bilder, of UCLA stated in an interview that Yeats and his wife George created and described the “intersecting gyres” or cones while they were probably under the influence of opium.
In the late “Sailing to Byzantium” the soul celebrates its achievements as it sees the body deteriorate.
Yeats defends aristocratic culture and is anti-modernist to that extent. This especially evident in “A Prayer for My Daughter”.
There are other main concerns that project in his poems, a certain Maud Gonne who in “A Dialogue of Self and Soul” he writes:
. . . that most fecund ditch of all
The folly that man does
Or must suffer, if he woos
A proud woman in kindred to his soul
The other concern is the “gyres” and his occultism. It attracted the attention even in clinical neuropsychology. Professor Robert Bilder, of UCLA stated in an interview that Yeats and his wife George created and described the “intersecting gyres” or cones while they were probably under the influence of opium.
March 26, 2022
There is so much to return to in Yeats’ work. However, the editing of this volume is stuffy and adds little to it. Skip the commentary and go straight to the poet.
Second reading and I will read again. Does he speak to me?
I don't think so, not in the way other poets have and do speak to me. Some of his intellectual contempt for ideas that I hold essential bleeds through and his dense references to classical works are fair and art in themselves but an admission price that I have not payed. SO in this sense I am excluded.
I might just be OK with that.
Second reading and I will read again. Does he speak to me?
I don't think so, not in the way other poets have and do speak to me. Some of his intellectual contempt for ideas that I hold essential bleeds through and his dense references to classical works are fair and art in themselves but an admission price that I have not payed. SO in this sense I am excluded.
I might just be OK with that.
November 18, 2013
I enjoy Yeats, always have. And, of course, the more I learn of his history and the socio-political environment in which he composed the greater appreciation I have.
December 8, 2012
My rating is more for the anthology than Yeats' poetry. It's hard to give a fair assessment when so many poems are clearly divorced from their contextualizing poem companions.
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