Poems of W. B. Yeats [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION The fact that poems have been chosen for this selection under eighteen different subject headings may indicate something of the diversity to be found in Yeats's poetry. He was a poet straddling two centuries. He began as a poet influenced by the great Victorians, yet seeking to establish his own individual note, writing lyrics with a delicate, haunting beauty. He developed into a leading — some would say the leading — twentieth-century poet, a modernist who influenced many of his contemporaries and continues to influence many poets writing today. Yeats wrote poetry from his teens - probably as early as 1883 -until his death in 1939: he developed and changed his style, and startling it seemed to many of those who had admired his early wistful 'twilight' poetry; he was consistently seeking directer, more urgent utterance yet casting his poetry in a rhetorical mould. It is this quality which poses continuous challenging questions to readers and ensures the continuing vitality of his work, its eminently quotable, indeed its insistently memorable dramatic force. To match this changing, developing style there was the poet, himself a changing, developing man, who as he gained in confidence, skill and success became the subject of his own poetry. That he made himself a fit subject for his art is a measure of his greatness; he contained variety enough of experience; though idiosyncratic, he was in touch with his age in such a way that he could, by concentrating upon subjects and imagery, by presenting them with masterly technique, imbue them with a continuing relevance for subsequent readers' own experiences and ideas. Certain aspects of his work are part of the poetic tradition, and are incorporated in it because that tradition lasts through its universality. An Indian reader, a Japanese, an American, may find Yeats today as vital as he seemed to readers in his lifetime — and yet different aspects of his poetry may appeal to them. There is a variety in the subject matter of his poetry, published during a period of fifty-four years; there is a certain lasting universality in the work of this poet who is so based in the literary history and even the political history of his own island. And yet, ironically perhaps, Yeats once told his wife that he had spent his whole life saying the same thing in different ways. What had he to say, then? Can we pluck one basic idea from his poems - or indeed his plays, his autobiographies, his essays, his journalism, his letters or his diaries? Or was his remark one of those deep rhetorical phrases that need to be decompressed, translated, brought into the prosaic light of day? Perhaps we can explain the continuing appeal of Yeats if we trace one of his underlying preoccupations which centres upon the common inescapable fact that all of us must die. 'What then?' sang Plato's ghost. 'What then?' is the refrain of a late poem in which the poet describes his life; desire for fame, acquisition of technical skill, the sheer hard work that laid the foundations for that fame, gaining