Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine
Save Your Time And Money
| AnyBook4Less.com | Order from a Major Online Bookstore |
|
| Home | Store List | FAQ | Contact Us | | ||
| Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money |
||
 |
Title: W. B. Yeats, a Life: II: The Arch-Poet, 1915-1939 (WB YEATS A LIFE) by R. F. Foster ISBN: 0-19-818465-4 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: December, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $45.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3 (2 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: Messin' With Ellmann et al
Comment: I agree, largely, with what I've read here. Foster *is* an anteater, to quote one Amazon reviewer.
On the other hand, you're dealing with Yeats. Yeats was probably the most sophisticated thinker about literary persona and literary stance that Western literature has ever produced. Only Shakespeare--who, as far as we know, never theorized explicitly about any of this, much less wrote it down--surpasses him, and not by design. Such figures as Pound are nothing in comparison. It should come as no surprise that Yeats' own autobiographical material is forbidding in the extreme; if you get past that you have Ellmann to deal with, and you'd best go loaded for bear.
Foster has taken a blunderbuss, since Ellmann showed up with a rifle. Nonetheless, both approaches are invaluable. Foster's work is magisterial, even if it's not a great literary biography *taken as such*. On the other hand, it offers an incredible resource for the serious student of Yeats. Detail aside (helpful as that is to scholars) Foster makes a very good case for Yeats' persona-management in public and private, something I have come to feel is essential to understanding the poet and which, along with the occult study, has been imperfectly examined. (See Maddox's ridiculous effort for an example of this at its worst.)
Read together, though, both major biographies tend to compliment each other very nicely. Give that a try.
Rating: 3
Summary: Te Diem
Comment: If I may be permitted to speak oxymoronically, this book as it once indispensable and utterly useless. It is indispensable for the sheer wealth and weight of fact it carries. The book constitutes a veritable rhapsody of small details, collected without due regard for relevance and with every regard for hanging on the the myriad fruits of bibliophilia. How then is it useless?It is useless because it dispenses with the immense effort - at once imaginative and cognitive - of reconstructing the relationships and the world to which the work and activity of Yeats was a response and against which he defined himself. This task of reconstruction is never only a matter of painstaking factual excavation. It is a question of reimagining a whole "field of force" (Wittgenstein) into which, so to speak, the poet was "thrown". This bok is a heroic but antiquarian leviathan.
 |
Title: The Apprentice Mage, 1865-1914 (W.B. Yeats: A Life, Vol. 1) by R. F. Foster ISBN: 0192117351 Publisher: Oxford Press Pub. Date: April, 1997 List Price(USD): $45.00 |
 |
Title: Goya by ROBERT HUGHES ISBN: 0394580281 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 11 November, 2003 List Price(USD): $45.00 |
 |
Title: Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, Edith Grossman, Harold Bloom ISBN: 0060188707 Publisher: Ecco Pub. Date: 21 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
 |
Title: The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making It Up in Ireland by R. F. Foster ISBN: 0195159020 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: July, 2002 List Price(USD): $28.00 |
 |
Title: Poems and Translations (LIBRARY OF AMERICA) by Ezra Pound, Richard Sieburth ISBN: 1931082413 Publisher: Library of America Pub. Date: 09 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $45.00 |
Thank you for visiting www.AnyBook4Less.com and enjoy your savings!
Copyright� 2001-2021 Send your comments
