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HomeBooksBritish Poets & PoetryYeats (Galaxy Book 378) |
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7 of 8 found the following review helpful:
Not for first-time Yeats readers Mar 19, 2010
By W. Buttler
"jumbuk"
I find this a somewhat unpleasant book.
Bloom's main thesis seems to be that Yeats has been over-rated by the majority of commentators, particularly his most well-known works (the Byzantium poems, Among children etc). He seems determined to take a contrarian point of view, praising little-known or under-appreciated works, and only begrudgingly admitting the power of Yeats's imagery in the later poems.
Bloom's other theses relate to his concept of "poetic influence" and the idea that Yeats is a continuation of the Romantic tradition rather than the first modernist. Both are interesting ideas, and well-supported by example and argument, but tend to swamp the reader who is just interested in gaining a better understanding of Yeats's works.
I am not competent to assess Bloom's knowledge of his subject, but it does seem immense. At times, he spends pages quoting from others in the Romantic tradition, and he is way above my head in his underastanding of Blake. He clearly holds Blake in high esteem - his greatest compliments to Yeats are to say he is "almost Blakean" - but inevitably modified with an exception to show why Yeats is not as honest or deep in his vision as Blake.
To give Bloom his due, he devotes a significant chunk of this book to "A Vision" and he has clearly spent a lot of time and effort in reading and understanding this most obtuse piece of Yeats's output. He also tries to be fair in assessing it's stature and relevance both to Yeats and to his present-day readers.
Despite all this, I was left with a feeling that Bloom does not like Yeats at all, and does not admit him into the company of the elite. He is entitled to his view, and of course that is one of the functions of a critic. Whilst this will all be useful as a counter to the "popular" view, particularly to a scholarly reader, it is hardly the most encouraging reference point for someone drawn to Yeats by the power of his most popular works, and wanting to gain a deeper understanding.
Oddly enough, I found the best introduction to Yeats to be Helen Vendler's magnificent study "Our secret discipline". I say "oddly enough" because her book is by her own admission an analysis of merely the structural forms of Yeats's poetry, not the content. However, it ends up providing deep insights couched in straightforward language, despite the technical jargon describing meter and rhyme schemes. Check this one out if you are early in your Yeats journey and looking for something more than study notes.
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