Yeats Selected Poetry (edition 1980)

We “did” Yeats for A level, so I had two years of his wonderful sonorous verse searing its way into my head. You don’t have to agree with his patrician view of the world and his contempt for Irish nationalists to enjoy his magnificent sound and his comments on the human condition. Favourites: “The Song of Wandering Aengus”; “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven”; “Towards Break of Day”; “We are blest by everything, everything we look upon is blest” from “A Dialogue of Self and Soul”; “Byzantium” with its wonderful incantatory images; “While on the shop and street I gazed My body of a sudden blazed” from “Vacillation”, and “Sleep, beloved, such a sleep” from “Lullaby”. Not included is his lovely “Prayer for My Son” which I traced online.

A good introduction to Yeats for the uninitiated. I found him a much more interesting poet than I had expected to. ( )

This edition includes an introduction and excellent end notes on places, hard words, intertextual references; a helpful title index follows. ( )