W.B. Yeats: Selected Poems (Hardcover)

by W. B. Yeats (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
All things can tempt me from this craft of verse:
One time it was a woman's face, or worse-
The seeming needs of my fool-driven land;
Now nothing but comes readier to the hand
Than this accustomed toil.
--From All Things Can Tempt Me

Nobel Prize winner W.B. Yeats laid the foundations for an Irish literary revival, drawing inspiration from his country's folklore, the occult, and Celtic philosophy. A writer of both poems and plays, he helped found Dublin's famed Abbey Theatre. The poems here provide an example of his life's work and artistry, beginning with verses such as "The Stolen Child" from his debut collection Crossways (written when he was 24) through "Why Should Not Old Men Be Mad?" from On the Boiler, published a year prior to his death.


From the Inside Flap
William Butler Yeats was not only one of the most beloved and honored poets of this century. Playwright, essayist, theatrical impresario, occultist, politician, famously hapless lover--he was also one of the most colorful and complex. Astonishingly, no full biography of Yeats has appeared in many years. Now, Keith Alldritt gives us a lively telling of Yeats's story that puts the poet in the context of his times, from the high Victorian era to the modernism of the thirties.

Alldritt reveals that Yeats was not just "the sensitive introvert who began as the mooning dreamer and after a lifetime seeking philosophical and hermetic wisdom, ended as the learned sage" that Yeats himself and his biographers would have us believe. He shows us a less familiar man: "a dedicated careerist, an ambitious man of determined self-interest, a seeker after social standing, and a combative man with a violent temper that sustained him in many nasty quarrels." Confrontational, scrappy, driven, he was deeply involved in both the political and literary issues of his day. He was instrumental in overturning the English domination of Irish literature and in researching and publishing books on Irish lore and fairy tales. He was the founder, with George Bernard Shaw, of the Irish Institute of Arts and Letters as well as the Abbey Theatre, where he refused to close down Synge's inflammatory play The Playboy of the Western World, despite riots in the street. During his tenure as senator in the Irish Parliament, he fought the Catholic divorce laws. At every level, Alldritt shows us a poet engaged in the world.

Yeats's long, passionate, and physically unrequited love affair with the beautiful Irish nationalist Maud Gonne, which led to some of his most poignant poetry, is brought vividly to life. Also covered in some detail are Yeats's numerous love affairs in the years before his death. Though condoned by his wife, they have not been explored in previous biographies out of respect for her feelings.

Another aspect of Yeats not generally appreciated is his involvement with literary movements outside Ireland and England. He wrote reviews for the Boston Globe; lectured regularly throughout the United States; and spent much time in France, where he was influenced by the symbolist poets, and in Italy, where he joined the Rapallo group led by the quixotic Ezra Pound.

In his years of research, Alldritt visited libraries worldwide. He was given special access to Yeats's private papers in the National Library of Ireland and interviewed many people who knew or are knowledgeable about Yeats, most notably Yeats's daughter, Anne.

Yeats has been called "the greatest poetic imagination of our century." Now Keith Alldritt reveals another facet of his extraordinary persona.

William Butler Yeats was a master craftsman, and one of his most skillful constructs was his own image. He wished to be remembered, above all, as an Irishman and a poet; as a man whose nature had been determined by the almost magical qualities of his childhood in Sligo and whose character had been shaped by the influence of admirable men. There is truth in this depiction of himself, but it is a partial truth only.

In this account, I attempt to go beyond his interior world and to evoke and do justice to those individuals and external forces which in their turn made up part of the dialectic of Yeats's life. Yeats lived at a time of profound changes for the Western world from the high Victorianism of the late 1800s to the advent of modernism in the 1930s. I have attempted to offer a strong sense of Yeats in his social and historical context--to show that an important side of his genius was his deep and often manipulative relationship with the turbulent life around him as with his turbulent life within. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 144 pages
• Publisher: Phoenix (March 28, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0753816652
• ISBN-13: 978-0760749135
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 4.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #665,148 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

37 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Misleading Title!!, August 23, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: W. B. Yeats: Selected Poems (Hardcover)

Obviously, it is the selection and not the poetry itself which merits the low rating. I ordered this text after consulting Books in Print; "Selected Poems" seems reasonable enough. In fact, the poems cover only the first half of Yeats's career, and thus many of his finest works are not represented. Caveat emptor!

13 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The cheapest way to obtain Yeats' best poems in hardcover!, April 4, 1999

By	[e-mail] (College Station, TEXAS) - See all my reviews

This review is from: W. B. Yeats: Selected Poems (Hardcover)

This book is for the classic Yeats reader who wants a greatest hits book, without the exhausting detail of the author's every waking moment. Expertly categorized, his great poems are woven into this book, with excellent type and font that is very readable. The cover is also elegantly designed (you can see it online).

2.0 out of 5 stars This review is of the Blackstone Audiobooks (February 1999) recording by William Sutherland: UNLISTENABLE! BEWARE!, March 17, 2009

By	C. Scanlon "least helpful reviewer" (among us humans) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: W.B. Yeats: Selected Poems (Audio Cassette)

Get the great recording by Shakespearean actor T. P. McKenna at W. B. Yeats (Poets for Pleasure) or better as reissued in Audio CD format at W.B. Yeats: Poems (Highbridge Classics) instead. It is priced far more favorably at this time one tenth of the cost of this, and it is actually audible in a well enunciated and comprehensible manner.

This recording by William Sutherland, on the other hand is absolutely unlistenable, despite the premium pricing. It seems exactly as if you awoke your old great uncle from his chair by the fire, drowsy with great years and tongue swollen from hock and seltzer, to have him read you unprepared pages from Yeats.

And the worst pages too. Occasionally by the third disk here on the briefer poems he manages to rose himself into conviction like an old fire horse hearing the alarm bell, but quickly fades back again into incomprehensible and swollen mumbles without emotion, nor understanding, merely a droning of sounds, and an amateur sing-song delivery.

And this for the most prolonged of Mr. Yeats's interminable epic lyrics, including reading to us alone the narrators part of who is saying what. This is to weep, to sleep, to turn off as soon as is politely permitted, and to replace with the mighty McKenna's brilliant readings.

Skip this; get McKenna, whom you like I will play all of the night long, repeatedly, and brilliantly. This present three disk set does not invite even one listening, let alone two. It does not inform. In fact, the words are indistinguishable.

Also, mine came without a playlist, nor any brochure at all, and no indication at all whatsoever of what we are listening to when. This is not worth the purchase. Buy instead McKenna for listening, and Poems (Everyman Poetry) and have something left over for further study, for the peat turf for that hearthside fire, for your great uncle to nod and to dream in peace and in warmth.