The Major Works

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Irish Literature - Rated
Yeats... what can I say? A terrible writer, a fraud whose plays are some of the worst ever written by anyone. His contribution to Irish literature is like that of Horatio Alger to American literature... at best. This would have been better had it been written by a troop of epileptic howler monkeys... what a business... impotent, nostalgic drivel by a man who Joyce and Beckett both despised. His work is tame, overwritten, pretentious, romantic (in the worst sense of the word) and, in fact, truly awful...

Yeats - The Master of Irish Poetry - Rated
W. B Yeats led a troubled life - his marriage rejections by the love of his life Maud Gonne, and his subsequent romantic liasons are well documented in his work. The angst-ridden "No Second Troy," a beautiful love poem dedicated to Irish revolutionary Gonne, illustrates his passion and his ability to convey his emotions with the power of words.

His allusions to Greek mythology are also evident here, with the above-mentioned "No Second Troy," and the disturbing "Leda and the Swan" both containing references to the Classical Greek ideas.

Furthermore, his strong sense of Irish patriotism is also evident here, with poems such as "An Irish Airman Forsees His Death;" "Easter 1916;" and "Sixteen Dead Men" all revealing his passion for the Irish Home Rule cause. However it must be remembered that Yeats was not only a master poet, but also a wonderful playwright, and plays such as Cathleen Ni Houlihan, which helped to establish the Abbey Theatre in Dublin as the Irish national theatre, are other masterly productions of Yeats' work that are contained in this volume.

I cannot praise this book enough. There are many reasons why it is an amazing volume, but the quality of the literature, the way Yeats moulds his words to create such beautiful poetry, must be seen to be believed