The Collected Poems of W.B.Yeats

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Swept off my feet - Rated
I first had to study Yeats for a school project and, quite simply, fell in love. (Well done to the male reviewer who discovered this powerful weapon of a poem.) The most beautiful poetry written and ranging from the romantic to the heart-breaking. Buy this book and you too will swoon.

"Keats and Yeats are on your side (and Wilde's on mine)" - Rated
I must be brief, as my lunch is dangerously close to completion, so here is my Yeats review condensed into a few points:

W.B. Yeats was the greatest poet of the 20th century, even if you only include the works he wrote after 1900.

Looking at his whole body of work, he was a genius and undoubtedly one of the great poets of literature.

Part of what makes him such a genius IMO is his range. At first Yeats seems to live up to how he is sketched - a modern-day (well, 20th century) romanticist with a love of mythology, etc. but then you keep reading and discover that his interests are much wider than just that.

Forget Jackson Pollack, Ernest Hemmingway, etc. - Yeats' life as a searcher for romanticism in a rational society is, I believe, the best model for an artist in modern times there is.

With Yeats, I think more so than other poets, his most minor, uncollected, obscure works are full of wonderful surprises (e.g. the one about H.G. Wells) and so it is important to get the most complete 'Complete Poems of W.B. Yeats as possible'. I read a copy of this very edition in my local library, and I believe this is very much comprehensive.

If you think Yeats had no command over the English language, then it is likely that you either (1) are not familar with modern poetry, which tends to avoid simple rhyming for rhyming's sake, (2) you do not have an eye for subtle nuance (e.g. the rhyming of a word with the exact same word in 'He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven' stripping the verse of a love poem's usual artificiality and underlining its simplicity and naturalness) or (3) you just don't get Yeats and what he's trying to do.

If you like Yeats, your next port of call should be Seamus Heaney. Sometimes Heaney can write utterly opaquely about the most obscure subjects, but he has also written some amazing poetry. To put on my soundbite hat, Heaney is the mid-20th century's own Yeats, the post-Joyce Yeats.

The quotation in my title is from the Smiths' 'Cemetery Gates' if you're wondering, which you probably weren't.

In conclusion: Yeats is great. Is he better than Joyce? Hard to say, as they both wrote primarily in the media they were best at (though don't think I'm claiming any sort of expertise on Irish literature though! This is all IMO) - Yeats poetry, Joyce novels. Just don't assume that Joyce was the modern modernist one and Yeats was old-fashioned, as it isn't that easy.

Beautiful - Rated
Yeats is without a doubt one of the most significant and influential poets of recent times, and probably the most important Anglo-Irish poet ever. His poems are deeply affecting, especially those concerning his unrequited love for Maud Gonne. They deal with diverse subjects like Irish politics of the time, the Republican movement, and more personal themes like love, growing old, death and the problems he saw facing an artist. My favourite poem is probably "Sailing To Byzantium;" "He Wishes For The Cloths Of Heaven" is beautiful too. I highly recommend this to anyone with even a passing interest in poetry.

Fall in love... - Rated
All I can say is fall in love with her, read her "He Wishes For The Cloths Of Heaven" and she will be yours.

Remarkably... mediocre - Rated
William Butler Yeats is about as bad a poet one can be and still be considered "great". All of his poems are earnest and sincere, but they are totally appalling in Yeats's lack of control of language. The ideas of his poems are instructive, prophetic, and occasionally moving, particularly as he grew older, but as a technical writer he was, 98% of the time, an incompetent bumbler.