W. B. Yeats [antikvár]

w. B. YeatsYeats is the great poet of our time and, if taste and judgment can be counted on, the greatest poet of the British Isles since Milton's time. From then till now nobody has made of parts so fine so fine a body of verse.Of embodying Yeats said: "Man can embody truth but he cannot know it." Statements of truth, in Yeats's poems anyway, are often questions. But his embodiments, grand and final, are beyond all question. Our confusions and his own yielded triumphs of measurement and, beyond these, what he called "magnanimities of sound.""Unity of being," his ideal in life and art, demanded composing a body of poems and recomposing some with that body in mind. Like a mortal body, this system of interacting parts developed and changed through the years. The Collected Poems, establishing unity, preserves each evolutionary stage. Early Yeats is at once like and unlike later Yeats. "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" is the vestigial youth of "Sailing to Byzantium." Or, to change Yeats's metaphor of the body for that of the tree, his poems are like a growing treea "rooted blossomer." The roots are one but the foliage changes through the four seasons and, after a display of flower and fruit, withers into the truth. However radical the analyst may be, delighting in seasons, he commonly finds three or four in the work of Yeats. Convenience, too, commends division, into periodssay, four.The work of Yeats in all four periods is of several kinds: poems, essays, stories, and plays. Work of each kind may be important, but limits here demand particular notice of the[3]