The Yeats Reader: A Portable Compendium of Poetry, Drama, and Prose
Yeats scholar Richard J. Finneran has carefully chosen the best and most representative selections from the body of poetry, drama, memoirs, critical essays, and writings on mysticism that have established Yeats as one of the greatest writers in the history of the English language.
Throughout his long life, William Butler Yeats -- Irish writer and premier lyric poet in English in this century -- 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. 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 the most comprehensive single volume to display the full range of Yeats's talents. It presents more than one hundred and fifty of his best-known poems -- more than any other compendium -- 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 Also included are selections from the memoirs left unpublished at his death and complete introductions written for a projected collection that never came to fruition.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.
A marvellous compendium and overview.
I first fell in love with Yeats poetry (specifically "The Song Of Wandering Aengus" before discovering the rest of his poetry) then discovered his plays and prose. I was particularly taken with his version of some classis Irish fairy tales.
This volume, with over a hundred of his poems, eight plays, around a dozen excerpts of autobiographical writing, a similar number of critical writings and half a dozen pieces of prose, covers a marvellous gamut of this mans work in around 600 pages. It is a good size to carry around with you.
The choices taken are good, all my favourite poems and plays are here, my only regret is that none of his fairy tales are here.
I would recommend this volume to anyone who enjoys Yeats poetry and/or plays and wants a good selection of his work in many fields. It is also the perfect introduction to his work for someone you know who might enjoy this marvellous poet. --Reviewer: Tony Williams from Neutral Bay, NSW Australia
