Luminous and timeless.
Written: Oct 17 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Quotations for half my life.
Cons: If you know nothing of Celtic myth, some poems may be confusing...
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| etain's Full Review: Yeats, William Butler |
I will be eternally grateful to Professor Brown and the New York University class I took in Irish literature for introducing me to Yeats. Not that I hadn't heard a poem or two by the man prior to the class; but having a background in Irish history just enhanced all the poems tenfold.
Even if you haven't that background, though, it's nearly impossible not to respond to the sheer beauty of some of his work; his poem about "The Cloths of Heaven" is one of my absolute favorite love poems, opening with the speaker wishing for "the Heavens' embroidered cloth/enwrought with gold and silver light," so he could spread it under his beloved's feet; "But," he goes on, "I, being poor, have only my dreams./...I have spread my dreams under your feet;/Tread softly because you tread on my dreams."
Whoa.
To this day passages from his poems leap to mind all the time. I had the entire first half of "The Second Coming" running through my head constantly during the Gulf War: "...Things fall apart, the center cannot hold..." When Milosevic was kicked out of Belgrade, my first thought was, "All is changed, changed utterly/A terrible beauty is born." And I have his poem "The Fascination of What's Difficult" permanently included in my notebooks whenever I'm working backstage on a play, so when I'm having a bad day I can read it and empathize with his line, "My curse on plays/that have to be set up in fifty ways..."
His earlier work does deal heavily with Celtic myth; he was writing at a time when the Irish intelligentsia were working toward a revival of Celtic culture, and chose a lot of the old folktales as his subjects, so some of the earlier works may be a puzzle to wrap your head around.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
etain
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Location: New York, NY
Reviews written: 19
Trusted by: 1 member
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