The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats: Amazon.co.uk: W.B. Yeats, Richard J. Finneran: Books

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Synopsis
Gathers all of the poems by the Irish writer, including reworkings of Irish myths and meditations on youth, love, nature, art, and war.

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The woods of Arcady are dead, Read the first page

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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover

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4.7 out of 5 stars (9 customer reviews)

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22 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful, 4 Sep 1999

By A Customer

Yeats is without a doubt one of the most significant and influential poets of recent times, and probably the most important Anglo-Irish poet ever. His poems are deeply affecting, especially those concerning his unrequited love for Maud Gonne. They deal with diverse subjects like Irish politics of the time, the Republican movement, and more personal themes like love, growing old, death and the problems he saw facing an artist. My favourite poem is probably "Sailing To Byzantium;" "He Wishes For The Cloths Of Heaven" is beautiful too. I highly recommend this to anyone with even a passing interest in poetry.

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25 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Keats and Yeats are on your side (and Wilde's on mine)", 1 Mar 2003

By	Richard Magrath - See all my reviews

I must be brief, as my lunch is dangerously close to completion, so here is my Yeats review condensed into a few points:

W.B. Yeats was the greatest poet of the 20th century, even if you only include the works he wrote after 1900.

Looking at his whole body of work, he was a genius and undoubtedly one of the great poets of literature.

Part of what makes him such a genius IMO is his range. At first Yeats seems to live up to how he is sketched - a modern-day (well, 20th century) romanticist with a love of mythology, etc. but then you keep reading and discover that his interests are much wider than just that.

Forget Jackson Pollack, Ernest Hemmingway, etc. - Yeats' life as a searcher for romanticism in a rational society is, I believe, the best model for an artist in modern times there is.

With Yeats, I think more so than other poets, his most minor, uncollected, obscure works are full of wonderful surprises (e.g. the one about H.G. Wells) and so it is important to get the most complete 'Complete Poems of W.B. Yeats as possible'. I read a copy of this very edition in my local library, and I believe this is very much comprehensive.

If you think Yeats had no command over the English language, then it is likely that you either (1) are not familar with modern poetry, which tends to avoid simple rhyming for rhyming's sake, (2) you do not have an eye for subtle nuance (e.g. the rhyming of a word with the exact same word in 'He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven' stripping the verse of a love poem's usual artificiality and underlining its simplicity and naturalness) or (3) you just don't get Yeats and what he's trying to do.

If you like Yeats, your next port of call should be Seamus Heaney. Sometimes Heaney can write utterly opaquely about the most obscure subjects, but he has also written some amazing poetry. To put on my soundbite hat, Heaney is the mid-20th century's own Yeats, the post-Joyce Yeats.

The quotation in my title is from the Smiths' 'Cemetery Gates' if you're wondering, which you probably weren't.

In conclusion: Yeats is great. Is he better than Joyce? Hard to say, as they both wrote primarily in the media they were best at (though don't think I'm claiming any sort of expertise on Irish literature though! This is all IMO) - Yeats poetry, Joyce novels. Just don't assume that Joyce was the modern modernist one and Yeats was old-fashioned, as it isn't that easy.

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4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Yeats's Second Coming, 30 Jun 1997

By A Customer

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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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Dubya Be - I had no idea
Over the last few months I have found myself writing a lot of poetry. This is something I've always dabbled in, but that seems lately to have acquired a new urgency and facility... Read more

Published 2 months ago by John Ferngrove

5.0 out of 5 stars Swept off my feet
I first had to study Yeats for a school project and, quite simply, fell in love. (Well done to the male reviewer who discovered this powerful weapon of a poem. Read more

Published on 19 Sep 2004 by nefertiti_thakrar

5.0 out of 5 stars Fall in love...
All I can say is fall in love with her, read her "He Wishes For The Cloths Of Heaven" and she will be yours.

Published on 6 Jun 1999

2.0 out of 5 stars Remarkably... mediocre
William Butler Yeats is about as bad a poet one can be and still be considered "great". All of his poems are earnest and sincere, but they are totally appalling in... Read more

Published on 23 Mar 1999

5.0 out of 5 stars Worth the time.
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.

Published on 10 Mar 1999

5.0 out of 5 stars The mastery of the most influential poet of this century
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. Read more

Published on 3 Aug 1998

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	87% buy the item featured on this page: The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats 4.7 out of 5 stars (9)
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The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats (Paperback)

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