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W. B. Yeats: A Life, Volume II: The Arch-Poet 1915-1939 Hardcover – December 1, 2003

by R. F. Foster (Author)

5 customer reviews

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The first volume in Roy Foster's magisterial biography of W.B. Yeats was hailed as "a work of huge significance" (The Atlantic Monthly) and "a stupendous historiographical feat" (Irish Sunday Independent). Now, the eagerly awaited second volume explores the complex poetic, political, and personal intricacies of Yeats's dramatic final decades, a period that saw the Easter Rebellion, the founding of the Irish state in 1922, and the production of Yeats's greatest masterpieces.
In the conclusion of this first fully authorized biography, Foster brilliantly illuminates the circumstances--the rich internal and external experiences--that shaped the great poetry of Yeats's later years: "The Wild Swans at Coole," "Sailing to Byzantium," "The Tower," "The Circus Animals Desertion," "Under Ben Bulben," and many others. Yeats's pursuit of Irish nationalism and an independent Irish culture, his continued search for supernatural truths through occult experimentation, his extraordinary marriage, a series of tempestuous love affairs, and his lingering obsession with Maud Gonne are all explored here with a nuance and awareness rare in literary biography. Foster gives us the very texture of Yeats's life and thought, revealing the many ways he made poetry out of the "quarrel" with himself and the upheaval around him. But this consummate biography also shows that Yeats was much more than simply a lyric poet and examines in great detail Yeats's non-poetic work--his essays, plays, polemics, and memoirs. The enormous and varied circle of Yeats's friends, lovers, family, collaborators and antagonists inhabit and enrich a personal world of astounding energy, artistic commitment and verve; while the poet himself is shown returning again and again to his governing preoccupations, sex and death.
Based on complete and unprecedented access to Yeats's papers and written with extraordinary grace and insight, W.B. Yeats, A Life offers the fullest portrait yet of the private and public life of one of the twentieth century's greatest poets.

W. B. Yeats: A Life, Volume II: The Arch-Poet 1915-1939

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Product Details

Series: Wb Yeats a Life (Book 2)
Hardcover: 798 pages
Publisher: Oxford University Press (December 1, 2003)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0198184654
ISBN-13: 978-0198184652
Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 2.1 x 6.5 inches
Shipping Weight: 3.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #641,696 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #278 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Reference & Collections
- #797 in Books > Literature & Fiction > History & Criticism > Genres & Styles > Poetry
- #1446 in Books > Literature & Fiction > History & Criticism > Regional & Cultural > European > British & Irish

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The Thrilling Conclusion

By Alan Charnock on January 29, 2013

Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase

This is, without any hesitation, the best, most readable, and most comprehensive Yeats biography that I've ever read, and the combination of comprehensive and readable is a master-stroke in itself. This poet has been my passion for going on five years, and the gift of having this book in existence is inexpressible.

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Meticulous and Inspired

By conjunction on March 29, 2013

Format: Hardcover

This book may be much better than four stars but to be honest I stopped reading after about half way. This was not because of any fault of the book, simply because my interest was not sustained. There are some things about Yeats I understand and some things I do not. I understand his love of the land and of tradition, I understand his interest in the past and Irish mythology, and I understand his promotion of Irish cultural life, the energy he put into the Abbey Theatre, and his carefully measured but at times passionate support for the independence movement. I also have an interest in how the occult becomes a constant theme in Yeats' poetry and his interest in the relationship between image and truth, 'How can you know the dancer from the dance?'

But for me the real interest in Yeats is his struggle to arrive at the kind of plateau he seems to have arrived at by the mid 1920s, from which point he seems to repeat old themes, and whatever there is that is new and further refined somehow ceases to engage me.

For me the vital chapters of this book are those that deal with the sudden re-arousal of Yeats' ferocious political instincts which occurs at the time of the Black and Tans, (as evidenced by his poem 'Reprisals', a fine poem never before printed but here included), and then Foster's careful discussion of 'A Vision', which I have never read but intend to, and which is no doubt a summary of many of his beliefs.

As in the first volume Foster's approach is exhaustive and meticulous without being dry or disinterested. All his relationships are hung up to dry, but for me are perhaps less fascinating than in the earlier volume. The relationships which most interest me are those with Gonne, Synge and Gregory, and to some extent his wife; those that came later don't grab me and unless I'm missing something it is Synge and Gonne more than anyone who turn up again and again in his poetry throughout his life.

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Distinguished Biography

By J. Farrell on December 28, 2008

Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase

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.

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Messin' With Ellmann et al

By A Customer on May 21, 2004

Format: Hardcover

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.

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Te Diem

By A Customer on June 1, 2002

Format: Unknown Binding

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.