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3.71 AVERAGE
3.71 AVERAGE
It was difficult for me to rate this volume using one to five stars. For the most part Yeats does not speak to me. It was a chore to finish this book. It was climbing a mountain just to say I’d done it, but finding the scenery along the way excessively tedious. Of the 507 poems in this comprehensive edition, I found five that were brilliant works of poetic genius. Those are the ones found in anthologies of best or favorite poems, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”, “The Wild Swans at Coole”, “The Second Coming”, “Sailing to Byzantium”, and “Leda and the Swan.” There we also pleasant enough dramatic and narrative poems like “The Island of Statues,” “The Shadowy Waters,” and “The Wandering of Oisin” that were enjoyable to read.
For the rest, I was bored by the overabundance of occult gibberish and symbolism about towers, roses, winding stairs, and gyres, and the tedium of having them repeated over and over again. I confess my ignorance of Irish folklore and politics. But, after reading his poems on those themes and receiving neither insight or pleasure from them, it sparked little desire or curiosity in me to learn more about either subject.
For the rest, I was bored by the overabundance of occult gibberish and symbolism about towers, roses, winding stairs, and gyres, and the tedium of having them repeated over and over again. I confess my ignorance of Irish folklore and politics. But, after reading his poems on those themes and receiving neither insight or pleasure from them, it sparked little desire or curiosity in me to learn more about either subject.