Product Description

At once praised and condemned by his contemporaries and by critics ever since for his highly complex poetic vision, William Butler Yeats remains one of the most important and controversial twentieth-century poets. In what has become a classic work of literary criticism, award-winning critic Harold Bloom breaks new ground with his radical interpretation of Yeats' relationship to the English Romantic tradition. Yeats tells the continuous story of the lifelong influence of Shelley, Blake, and the Romantic tradition upon Yeats' work. Through his analysis of the full spectrum of Yeats' poems and plays, Bloom offers a profound reinterpretation of poetic influence in general.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #640710 in Books
• Published on: 1972-09-14
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 512 pages

Review
"Beautiful, radical, and un-reductive....The disturbing, vivid quality of Bloom's book comes from [the] creative clash of opposed imaginations, and it involves the reader in emphatic excitement at a very deep level."--Ann Wordsworth, The Spectator

"Controversial and memorable....Yeats has a freshness and sharpness, an originality, which is a rare virtue in studies of Yeats....This is one of the few books of a purely critical kind on Yeats that...deserves to rank as a classic."--Times Literary Supplement

"The best book on Yeats yet written....No previous critic of Yeats has had anything like Bloom's encyclopedic command and eidetic recall of the English Romantic tradition....Unlikely to be superseded....Yeats has at last found his proper...critic in Bloom."--Helen Vendler, Journal of English and Germanic Philology

"The best book on Yeats yet written....It [contains] a brilliant and comprehensive account...of Yeats' connections to Romanticism, above all, of his debts to Blake, Shelley, and Keats....No previous critic of Yeats has had anything like Bloom's encyclopedic command and eidetic recall of the English Romantic tradition....Unlikely to be superseded....Yeats has at last found his proper...critic in Bloom."--Helen Vendler, Journal of English and Germanic Philology

"[Bloom] is one of the most nearly omniscient students of the Romantics we have, and his knowledge of Yeats has a similar spaciousness."--Kenneth Connelly, The Yale Review

"Anyone studying or teaching modern poetry will be using this book for decades."--John Hollander, Poetry

About the Author

Harold Bloom is Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. He is the author of many books, including Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, and Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate, and co-editor with Lionel Trilling of Romantic Poetry and Prose and Victorian Poetry and Prose.