Volume 24, Number 9 · May 26, 1977
The Hard Case of Yeats
By Denis Donoghue
Yeats
by Frank Tuohy
Macmillan, 232 pp., $17.95
Maud Gonne
by Samuel Levenson
Reader's Digest Press, 436 pp., $15.00
W.B. Yeats and the Idea of a Theatre
by James W. Flannery
Yale University Press, 404 pp., $22.50
The Cuchulain Plays of W.B. Yeats
by Reg Skene
Columbia University Press, 278 pp., $15.00
W.B. Yeats's status in modern literature offers a serious challenge to criticism. It is easy to say that he is a major poet and that he holds a crucial position in any account of the modern movement. Think of modern poetry without Yeats: an entire range of experience and a correspondingly authentic style, nuances of austerity and hauteur, would be sensed as missing elements. Yeats's work is secure, we find ourselves saying. But I am not certain that we can feel the security as irresistibly as the need to assert it. Among the modern poets who exert a major claim upon our attention, Yeats seems to exert a claim indisputable only on grounds that are often questionable, if not suspect. What surrounds Yeats's name is not the aura of an achieved poetry, a body of work separable from its origins, but an impression of genius fulfilled chiefly in the multiplicity of its life. In 'The Choice' Yeats wrote:
Review, 5820 words
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