Running to Paradise: Yeats's Poetic Art / Edition 1

by M. L. Rosenthal

Overview

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 Yeats'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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195113914
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	04/24/1997
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	5.44(w) x 8.19(h) x 0.95(d)
Lexile:	1260L (what's this?)

About the Author

M.L. Rosenthal was Professor Emeritus at New York University and 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 (with Sally M. Gall) The Poet's Art, and Our Life in Poetry, and As for Love: Poems and Translations.

Editorial Reviews

"The fruit of a lifetime studying and teaching Yeats, Running to Paradise offers a provocative commentary on the poetry and drama. A poet as well as an internationally renowned scholar, Rosenthal not only discloses the essential ideas in Yeats's work, but also demonstrates how those concepts are embedded in the texture of the verse itself. The volume is also a welcome reaffirmation that significant literary criticism need not be couched in the language of a coterie. Written in a style at once elegant and accessible, Running to Paradise is an essential companion to Yeats's poe ms and plays."—Richard J. Finneran, Editor, An Annual of Critical and Textual Studies

From the Publisher