The Yeats Reader: A Portable Compendium of Poetry, Drama, and Prose - Hardcover

Yeats, William Butler

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9780743233156: The Yeats Reader: A Portable Compendium of Poetry, Drama, and Prose

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0743233158 ISBN 13: 9780743233156

Publisher: Scribner, 2002

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Throughout his long life, William Butler Yeats -- Irish writer and premier lyric poet in English in this century -- produced important works in every literary genre, works of astonishing range, energy, erudition, beauty, and skill. His early poetry is memorable and moving. His poems and plays of middle age address the human condition with language that has entered our vocabulary for cataclysmic personal and world events. The writings of his final years offer wisdom, courage, humor, and sheer technical virtuosity. T. S. Eliot pronounced Yeats "the greatest poet of our time -- certainly the greatest in this language, and so far as I am able to judge, in any language" and "one of the few whose history is the history of their own time, who are a part of the consciousness of an age which cannot be understood without them."
The Yeats Reader is the most comprehensive single volume to display the full range of Yeats's talents. It presents more than one hundred and fifty of his best-known poems -- more than any other compendium -- plus eight plays, a sampling of his prose tales, and excerpts from his published autobiographical and critical writings. In addition, an appendix offers six early texts of poems that Yeats later revised. Also included are selections from the memoirs left unpublished at his death and complete introductions written for a projected collection that never came to fruition. These are supplemented by unobtrusive annotation and a chronology of the life.
Yeats was a protean writer and thinker, and few writers so thoroughly reward a reader's efforts to essay the whole of their canon. This volume is an excellent place to begin that enterprise, to renew an old acquaintance with one of world literature's great voices, or to continue a lifelong interest in the phenomenon of literary genius.

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About the Author:

William Butler Yeats is generally considered to be Ireland’s greatest poet, living or dead, and one of the most important literary figures of the twentieth century. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923.

The late Richard J. Finneran was general editor, with George Mills Harper, of The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats for many years; series editor of The Poems in the Cornell Yeats; and editor of Yeats: An Annual of Critical and Textual Studies, among other works. He held the Hodges Chair of Excellence at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville; was a past president of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association; and served as executive director of the Society for Textual Scholarship.

Review:

'...will suit courses which deal with Yeats's work as a whole. In this sense, as well, Finneran's volume is a superior teaching tool to Pethica's...The prefactory matter is short, but well written, and makes a strong case for having available in one volume both the creative and critical output which we know are so inter-referential that to ignore or to minimise the importance of the latter is to miss valuable insight into the former. This is a fine effort, and a boon to intructors. Finneran has chosen wisely and well, and both students and instructors will be grateful that such a volume is now available to us all.' - Christina Hunt, The Catholic University of America, Washington, DC, Irish Studies Review

'Richard Finneran's The Yeats Rader (revised edition) is a must.' - William Baker, Professor, Department of English/University Libraries, Northern Illinois University, USA

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