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3.68 AVERAGE
3.68 AVERAGE
challenging
emotional
reflective
sad
slow-paced
challenging
mysterious
fast-paced
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
N/A
Strong character development:
N/A
Loveable characters:
N/A
Diverse cast of characters:
N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus:
N/A
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
dark
slow-paced
Good as a foundational read. I didn't particularly enjoy reading it, though.
challenging
emotional
inspiring
medium-paced
Strong character development:
N/A
Loveable characters:
N/A
Diverse cast of characters:
N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus:
N/A
Lovely book - but Yeats is in his full neo-classical stage here. Sure, Leda and the Swan is torrid - but much of the rest is far too intellectual. The best parts are when he focuses on his contemporary Ireland - The Tower, Meditations in Time of Civil War, and Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen.
Some of the poems are so easy to like and paint beautiful, rich images, like 'Sailing to Byzantium', but then there are other poems which forced me to read quite a lot of secondary literature and ask other people in order to decode their meaning - usually, only to discover that this one, too is about the Irish Easter Rising and/or Maud Gonne. It was when Yeats – or rather the Lyrical I – described spying on school girls and desiring them that this work lost me completely.
Almost every poem in this collection is a full-bodied bone shaker, burning and terrible. The only reason I don't give it five stars is that one or two of the poems are "only" very good, rather than great.
Poetry! This collection contains not only The Tower which is weird and spectacular but also Leda and the Swan, which is basically the most aestheticized poem you will ever read about mythologized sexual assault (thanks, Zeus). How many times can Yeats use the word "thighs" in one poem? The world may never know.