Selected Poems and Four Plays
William Butler Yeats
(Author)
M. L. Rosenthal
(Editor)
Description
Since its first appearance in 1962, M. L. Rosenthal's classic selection of Yeats's poems and plays has attracted hundreds of thousands of readers. This newly revised edition includes 211 poems and 4 plays. It adds The Words Upon the Window-Pane, one of Yeats's most startling dramatic works in its realistic use of a seance as the setting for an eerily powerful reenactment of Jonathan Swift's rigorous idealism, baffling love relationships, and tragic madness. The collection profits from recent scholarship that has helped to establish Yeats's most reliable texts, in the order set by the poet himself. And his powerful lyrical sequences are amply represented, culminating in the selection from Last Poems and Two Plays, which reaches its climax in the brilliant poetic plays The Death of Cuchulain and Purgatory. Scholars, students, and all who delight in Yeats's varied music and sheer quality will rejoice in this expanded edition. As the introduction observes, "Early and late he has the simple, indispensable gift of enchanting the ear....He was also the poet who, while very much of his own day in Ireland, spoke best to the people of all countries. And though he plunged deep into arcane studies, his themes are most clearly the general ones of life and death, love and hate, man's condition, and history's meanings. He began as a sometimes effete post-Romantic, heir to the pre-Raphaelites, and then, quite naturally, became a leading British Symbolist; but he grew at last into the boldest, most vigorous voice of this century." Selected Poems and Four Plays represents the essential achievement of the greatest twentieth-century poet to write in English.
Product Details
Price
$18.99
$17.66
Publisher
Scribner Book Company
Publish Date
September 09, 1996
Pages
320
Dimensions
5.5 X 8.4 X 0.9 inches | 0.8 pounds
Language
English
Type
Paperback
EAN/UPC
9780684826462
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William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) was an Irish poet and one of the great writers of the 20th century. A pillar of the Irish literary establishment, he helped to found the Abbey Theatre, and in his later years served two terms as a Senator of the Irish Free State. Often considered a Symbolist, he was preoccupied with metaphysics, the occult, physical and spiritual masks, mythology (especially Irish legends) as well as with cyclical theories of life, although he retained his formalism. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. His poetry collections include The Wild Swans at Coole, The Tower, and The Winding Stair and Other Poems.