Running to Paradise: Yeats's Poetic Art

Running to Paradise: Yeats's Poetic Art

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. Rosenthal offers a close, sensitive reading of Yeats's major poems and plays. Proceeding chronologically through the entire oeuvre, Rosenthal, a poet and professor emeritus at New York University, explores the relations between poems and between volumes, identifying poetic sequences and tracing the path of Yeats's career. Though not a systematic account of Yeats's times, life, or mythology, the book discusses the poems in their personal and historical contexts. Experts will find little that is new here: Rosenthal gives no attention to theoretical debates, and there are no notes or references to recent scholia. But even specialists will be impressed by the insight and responsiveness of the readings, while the abundant quotations from the poems and plays (hardly a page quotes fewer than ten lines of verse) make this study especially valuable for those less familiar with the poet. Recommended for academic libraries. - Jack Lynch, Univ. of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. 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 .