Customer Reviews

W. B. Yeats: A Life Volume II: The Arch-Poet 1915-1939 (v. 2)

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Roy Foster has lived up to the standard he set in the first volume of this biography. This is deeply researched, well-written, and wonderfully informative account of Yeats's life.

I agree, largely, with what I've read here. Foster *is* an anteater, to quote one Amazon reviewer.

On the other hand, you're dealing with Yeats. Yeats was probably the most sophisticated thinker about literary persona and literary stance that Western literature has ever produced. Only Shakespeare--who, as far as we know, never theorized explicitly about any of this, much less wrote it down--surpasses him, and not by design. Such figures as Pound are nothing in comparison. It should come as no surprise that Yeats' own autobiographical material is forbidding in the extreme; if you get past that you have Ellmann to deal with, and you'd best go loaded for bear.

Foster has taken a blunderbuss, since Ellmann showed up with a rifle. Nonetheless, both approaches are invaluable. Foster's work is magisterial, even if it's not a great literary biography *taken as such*. On the other hand, it offers an incredible resource for the serious student of Yeats. Detail aside (helpful as that is to scholars) Foster makes a very good case for Yeats' persona-management in public and private, something I have come to feel is essential to understanding the poet and which, along with the occult study, has been imperfectly examined. (See Maddox's ridiculous effort for an example of this at its worst.)

Read together, though, both major biographies tend to compliment each other very nicely. Give that a try.

If I may be permitted to speak oxymoronically, this book as it once indispensable and utterly useless. It is indispensable for the sheer wealth and weight of fact it carries. The book constitutes a veritable rhapsody of small details, collected without due regard for relevance and with every regard for hanging on the the myriad fruits of bibliophilia. How then is it useless?It is useless because it dispenses with the immense effort - at once imaginative and cognitive - of reconstructing the relationships and the world to which the work and activity of Yeats was a response and against which he defined himself. This task of reconstruction is never only a matter of painstaking factual excavation. It is a question of reimagining a whole "field of force" (Wittgenstein) into which, so to speak, the poet was "thrown". This bok is a heroic but antiquarian leviathan.