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| Selected Poems (Penguin Modern Classics) | 
 enlarge | Author: William Yeats
Creator: Timothy Webb
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Category: Book
List Price: £8.99
Buy Used: £4.00
You Save: £4.99 (56%)
New (22) from £4.14
Avg. Customer Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 84690
Media: Paperback
Edition: Re-issue
Pages: 368
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 7.7 x 5 x 0.7
ISBN: 0141181257
Dewey Decimal Number: 811
EAN: 9780141181257
ASIN: 0141181257
Publication Date: May 25, 2000
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
Condition: Used for one University Semester and has no notes made in it and is not highlighted
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"And I would find myself and not an image." November 6, 2007
This selection gives 28 pages to the early 1890's Decadent period, 41 pages between 1900 and 1917 when Yeats felt his verse growing more assertive and definite, and then 139 pages for the remaining Modernist period from 1917 till the poet's death in 1939. In fairness, the selection reflects the quality of Yeats' writing throughout his life rather than any bias on the part of Webb. Yeats himself said "as I look back upon my own writing, I take pleasure alone in those verses where it seems to me I have found something hard and cold", a reference to the complacently dreamy verses of the early Crossways, still to be found lingering round the corner of The Lake-Isle of Innisfree.
Yeats resolved his life through his poetry, as an avid reader of Nietzsche he was constantly recapitulating, reconciling himself with his past; Ego Dominus Tuus epitomises that. He spent much energy in attempting to reconcile Ireland to an image of itself, one neither effeminately sentimental as the English stereotype made out ("always ready to revolt against the despotism of fact" - Arnold), nor as one-dimensionally political as the Young Ireland propaganda-culture threatened to make it. Poems The Fisherman, Easter 1916, September 1913, all display Yeats' construction of and frustration at Irish identity at the time. Ultimately though, it's his final concern between competing and complementary opposites, a theme developed through the spiritualism of his book A Vision, the opposition of abstract knowledge and visceral activity, which defines much of his later, modern verse. The Tower, Sailing to Byzantium, The Second Coming, and on to Under Ben Bulben, each reflect the theme of periodic revolution of opposite states; life/death, wisdom/vulgarity, quality/baseness... These are the haunting and powerful poems of a proud but aging man at war with both himself and the mediocre world of "greasy tills" he felt overtaking him.
Yeats would probably have agreed with Steven Wallace that, "poetry is essentially romantic". Much of this selection shows his attempt to romanticise or dramatise his country and himself, his wish to create symbols of Ireland and `Yeats - the poet' that would become part of the national, almost mythological, heritage of the new Free State. For that reason the selection reads, at times, as an autobiography in verse, one in which the poet and poem fall into each other like the worlds of a Borges short-story (only 40-odd years before the master trickster himself). Brilliant stuff. Definitely recommend it.
Excellent collection of Yeats work February 8, 2002
11 out of 13 found this review helpful
This book offers a fine collection of some of Yeats greatest poetry including: He wishes for the cloths of heaven, Easter 1916 and The Second Coming. This book is a must for all lovers of yeats and newcomers alike.
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