Running to Paradise Yeats's Poetic Art

by Rosenthal, M.L.

• ISBN13: 9780195052008
• ISBN10: 0195052005
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1994-01-06
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

In Running to Paradise , M.L. Rosenthal, hailed by the Times Literary Supplement as "one of the most important critics of twentieth-century poetry," leads us through the lyric poetry and poetic drama of our century's greatest poet in English. His readings shed new, vivid light on Yeats's daring uses of tradition, his love poetry, and the way he faced the often tragic realities of revolution and civil war. Running to Paradise describes Yeat's whole effort--sometimes leavened by wild humor--to convey, with high poetic integrity, his passionate sense of his own life and of his chaotic era. Himself a noted poet, Rosenthal stresses Yeats's artistry and psychological candor. The book ranges from his early exquisite lyrical poems and folklore-rooted plays, through the tougher-minded, more confessional mature work (including the sublime achievement of The Tower ), and then to the sometimes "mad" yet often brilliant tragic or comic writing of his last years. Quoting extensively from Yeats, Rosenthal charts the gathering force with which the poet confronted his major life-issues: his art's demands, his persistent but hopeless love for one woman, the complexities of marriage to another woman at age 52, and his distress during Ireland's "Troubles." Yeats's deep absorption in female sensibility, in the cycles of history and human thought, and in supernaturalism and "the dead" comes strongly into play as well.

Author Biography

About the Author:
M.L. Rosenthal is Professor Emeritus at New York University and has lectured and read around the world. His many books include The Modern Poets: A Critical Introduction, The Modern Poetic Sequence: The Genius of Modern Poetry, The Poet's Art, and Our Life in Poetry. His most recent volume of poetry is As for Love: Poems and Translations.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. vii
Introduction	p. xi
Early Poems (with Some Glances Ahead)	p. 3
Early Drama (with Some Glances Ahead)	p. 35
Poetry of Transition I (1910-1914)	p. 80
Drama of Transition and the Cuchulain Cycle	p. 120
Poetry of Transition II (1914-1919)	p. 171
the Tower	p. 217
Drama of the 1930s	p. 264
Poetry After the Tower	p. 298
Index	p. 355
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