Anyone up to discussing W.B. Yeats ?

I read a newspaper article yesterday and it left me lots and lots of questions about him. First, does anyone have any suggestions about biographies?

#1 --

No.

I just bought a copy of his collected poems by John Kelly. It is from the Phoenix Poetry series by Oxford Press. What is neat about it is that at the end there is a chronology of Yeat's life and also a chronology of his times (ie 1867 Fenian rising)

The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats and Yeats: The Man and the Masks are sitting on my shelf, but I have yet to read them. The latter is Ellman, so it might be a place to start if you take your biography with a spoonful of literary criticism (or is it vice versa?).

Not a biography exactly, but The National Library of Ireland has a fascinating on-line exhibition entitled "The Life and Works of William Butler Yeats" at http://www.nli.ie/yeats/ . A book I have been after for a while is A Reader's Guide to William Butler Yeats by John Unterecker. I have not seen the book, but it is a standard guide to his works and, given the nature of his poetry, it presumably must include a lot of biographical information. Any comments on Unterecker?

Roy Foster has written a two-volume biography of Yeats that is supposed to be quite good. There is a video of a lecture by Foster online that deals with the second of the two volumes. It's an informative and interesting talk. The video can be found here: http://forum.wgbh.org/wgbh/forum.php?lecture_id=1396

Thank you beardo.

Helen Vendler has a relatively recent book about Yeats and his poetry. She's a remarkable critic, and while the work focuses more on his poetic forms than on his life, it would be a great adjunct to any biographical reading you did.

so what questions do you have about Yeats, yareader2?

I'd love to join in on a discussion about Yeats.

Recommendations re: biographies - Roy Foster's two volume bio, as mentioned above, is excellent, though it is perhaps a little weighted more to Yeats' political life than is warranted. Nevertheless, it's definitely the foremost biography. Yeats: The Man and The Masks is good to read alongside it. But with a poet so interested in the way in which the self is made and presented, it's good to read him in his own words. Yeatsian selves seem to change between forms of writing (poetry, prose, criticism, journalism, political writing) and through his continual editing of his past work. A Vision is where Yeats' flurry of self-editing becomes most obvious, though, frankly, it's a bit tedious, and only made sense to me after going through The Book of Yeats' Vision.

But really - of course! - the place where Yeats starts and ends is his poetry, and there are innumerable editions out there. Fortunately, there's been something of a trend for biographical reading of Yeats, with A.N. Jeffares probably the most formidable of biographical readers. Personally, I prefer Daniel Albright's edition of The Poems (published by Everyman - don't seem to be able to touchstone this!), which has extensive notes synthesizing the biographical approach with notes on Yeats' wider intellectual interests.

sskwire - interesting that you liked Our Secret Discipline, I thought it was a remarkably uneven book - Vendler is a great close reader (the opening chapter, involving 'Speech After Long Silence' is extraordinary, as is the work on 'Sailing to Byzantium') - it's undeniable that Yeats' formal choices are significant, but I found that in many cases the poetry couldn't really be contained by that single mode of analysis, particularly with the sonnet/broken sonnet forms and, in particular, 'Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen'. In that latter case, her analysis elides the significant function of poetic choices *other* than form, particularly Yeatsian lexis, and goes so far as to attribute them simply to formal choice. It's not a bad book by any means, I suspect I'm mostly distrustful of Vendler's easy trust in the relationship between the form and meaning is one of signification (i.e., form carries on the rhetorical content of the poem), and confused, in a work that is interested in form, why the concentration is simply on Yeats' relationship with the dead masters of form, rather than also examining his work in the light of the formal experimentation of his contemporaries.

no recommendations, just wanted to say I love Yeats, we studied him for A level english and I couldn't have been happier.

Our Secret Discipline sounds amazing. I'll see if I can find it in my local library. I have two interests in Yeats right now, one is the chronological events in his life at the time of his writing certain poems and the other is Sandymount Castle in Dublin.

I think this is all you really have to know

THE SECOND COMING

TURNING and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

#10 --

There's a significant amount of his poetry online. One can essentially reassemble his separate volumes, which is an engaged way of reading him.