Who was the better Poet Yeats or Wordsworth?

[whitman]

Who was the better poet Yeats or Wordsworth?

[mortalterror]

I don't think it's even close. Wordsworth is modern English poetry. He completely changed neo-classical attitudes to romantic ones, changed the way we write blank verse more than any man since Milton, and put that touchy feely modern hippy love of nature stuff at the forefront of poetry. Yeats was really good, but I don't think his body of work or his subsequent influence can compare to that of Wordsworth.

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

But, in true LitNet fashion, one must ask if influence is the only, or correct, criteria for determining an artist's worth.

Personally, I prefer Yeats, but I would have to agree that Wordsworth is probably the more "important" of the two poets.

[The Comedian]

I can only speak for myself but I think Yeats was the better poet overall -- his Collected Poems never gathers dust on my shelves. I go back to dog-eared, annotated pages often. But, some of my favorite individual poems are by Wordsworth -- the chink in Wordsworth, for me, is his overall body of work. Aside from those stunning works published in Lyrical Ballads and a few others, they just don't approach the consistent greatness of nearly all of Yeats' work.

[Alexander III]

But, in true LitNet fashion, one must ask if influence is the only, or correct, criteria for determining an artist's worth.

Personally, I prefer Yeats, but I would have to agree that Wordsworth is probably the more "important" of the two poets.

While influence is a huge criteria, you are right its not the only one. Still, though Wordsworth produced a lot of crap, his best poems are much better than the best of Yeats.

Though I prefer second generation romantics and think them all better than the fist generation - still if we look at the 20th century the only english poets who can adequately compete with the big six are T.S Elliot and Ezra Pound.

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

Still, though Wordsworth produced a lot of crap, his best poems are much better than the best of Yeats.
According to whom? Other than you, of course.... I've read both, and while I agree Wordsworth is probably a better poet in terms of influence, I never read anything that seemed to support this claim beyond a subjective viewpoint.

[JCamilo]

In this case, influence is not a good judge. They are not so disclosed, Wordsworth is influential, but Yeats is (99% of the new paganism garbage have his hand). And Wordsworth cann't say much about his influence without Coleridge or Blake nearby, even Byron and Keats and Shelley have a say in this area (they are more the prototype of romantic poet than Wordsworth was, Blake has influence everywhere with form, Coleridge intellectual and critical influence is very relevant).

Another thing, Yeats is considerable more international than Wordsworth.

[mortalterror]

I can only speak for myself but I think Yeats was the better poet overall -- his Collected Poems never gathers dust on my shelves. I go back to dog-eared, annotated pages often. But, some of my favorite individual poems are by Wordsworth -- the chink in Wordsworth, for me, is his overall body of work. Aside from those stunning works published in Lyrical Ballads and a few others approach the consistent greatness of nearly all of Yeats' work.

Wordsworth's overall output is uneven, but he put out more great poems than Yeats: I wandered lonely as a cloud, Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey, The Prelude, Ode: Intimations of Immortality, London 1802, The World is Too Much With Us, She dwelt among the untrodden ways, Michael, Upon Westminster Bridge, The Solitary Reaper, to name some of the best. Now, I happen to have Yeats Collected Poems in front of me and I'll list some of his greats: The Second Coming, Leda and the Swan, The Wanderings of Oisin, Easter 1916, The Tower, The Lake Isle of Innisfree, No Second Troy, The Wild Swans at Coole, An Irish Airman Foresees his Death, and Sailing To Byzantium. Most of Yeats other stuff is alright, but it ain't great like those poems.

[JCamilo]

Well, I do not see that much difference between lest say Leda and the Swan and Tintern Abbey... If there is, it is so minimal that Yeats never turning in a old bore would count favorably to Yeats... Plus, neither of them wrote, lets say, Ancinet Marineer, and Wordsworth consistency have been used favorably to this one, over the erratic but undoubtly genial Coleridge.

I think all those guys are too even. You can bring Byron.. maybe Tennyson or Brownings and have strong argument toward those guys. It is not like someone is claimming Oscar Wilde was a better poet than Dante.

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

It is not like someone is claimming Oscar Wilde was a better poet than Dante.
That's kind of my thinking. Wordsworth and Yeats just seem relatively equally received to point to one and say, "He was better, no question." Both wrote poor stuff, both wrote great stuff, and I'm not really sure absolutes like the ones being stated here can really apply.

[blazeofglory]

In fact both have different fields and indeed voluminously Wordsworth had more and qualitatively? I cannot say exactly. Wordsworth was deeply rooted in natural elements in his poems. He had an iconoclasm and that differentiated his from his predecessors. he wrote marvelously, and wrote terse poems compacted with beauty, romance, nature rooted for the rustiness of pastorals

But in Yeats I have seen the mystic depth mostly unfathomed by any others. William Blake too was a mystic but Yeats' mystic way is different. I like his kind and is therefore I like to be nonjudgmental

[stlukesguild]

I must agree with Mortal on this one. While I love Yeats and credit him as one of the poets that led to my current love of poetry, Wordsworth is one of those central towering figures. Admittedly his oeuvre is uneven... especially the later work. Even so, the scale of his "essential" works is still more than formidable. One also needs to deal with the innovation of the work and its impact. As Mortal points out, he brought about a new approach to blank verse that was to become a huge impact upon how English verse was written... as much so as Whitman affected upon American verse. He also, I must agree, acts as the central break (at least within English letters) from what went before to Romanticism. As much as I love Blake and Byron, in many ways they remain rooted in older traditions of poetic form... and more importantly, of subject matter. Wordsworth is central to the poem of the poet's internal being. External subjects become merely motifs that he responds to. Blake writes about the Tyger and Shelley about Ozymandias and Byron about Don Juan... but Wordsworth's subject is "I"... "me"... himself... and the poet's language is no longer a conscious formal choice but rather it is his honest true "voice".

[Dark Muse]

I will not claim to be the authority on whom is better than who on the grand scale of things. I speak only for my own personal preference. And I much prefer Wordsworth. He is in fact a favorite of mine all around. While Yeats on the other hand I just do not care for that much and never could get as much into his work. I won't say he doesn't have some good stuff, but I read and enjoy reading Wordsworth more.

[JCamilo]

I still struggle to see Wordsworth to be such central towering figure. Not even his most ground breaking book (Lyricall Ballads) is his own only. Much of the credit of inovations must be split with Coleridge and even today, a single poem of him is enduring better than Wordsworth.

His central voice is without doubt relevant, the notion of contemplative poet in contrast with the active of Byron, but Schiller had it also and so did Goethe. His breakdown romanticism is only in england, the process was in effect alredy in Germany (from where him and Coleridge got their main influences) and it is necessary much to claim he towered over Schiller, really. The guy's aesthetic is the aesthetic of romanticism.

As Blake, the form of Blake is almost the prose-poetry already. French symbolism will draw more from blake than Wordsworth for example. And his competition with Byron still a good one. It is not even talking outside england (Byron and Blake are easily the most influential romantic poets from england outside there) but inside. Byron seems to affect as much as wordsworth, the same poets, which balanced Byron ultra personality with wordsworth nature (maybe because Wordsworth real personalty had no appeal), the Bronte Sisters carry both, Keats carries both, Emily Dickinson carries both, Barrett Browning both... I really fall to see Wordsworth as such towering persona, considering the competition he always had. Even inside england, it is reasonable to find 5 romantic poets that face him. Outside then... while Yeats, had whom? really, Eliott? And the some who are completelly different like Neruda, Rilke, Pessoa?

And before anyone saying that was his time (his time there was no real competition with Byron) it is not. It is still hard to see him towering right now Keats, Byron, Blake and Coleridge. Not just a poet of course, but what happened with Wordsworth persona when Keats ceased to be, Whitman became the cosmos and Pessoa a lot of people? It seems more than a match for Yeats's melancholy, sensuality and mysticism.

[conartist]

Wordworth's work in Lyrical Ballads has been far more influential than Coleridge's. Coleridge has the most famous work in there, yes, but in Tintern Abbey, without any constructs, any characters, Wordsworth faces a crisis, brings it to the outside world, tries to resolve the two, tries to plumb the depths of his memory and himself and ends by trying to find something comforting, if not transcendent. In other words, he invents the last two hundred years of English poetry. Look at every work of Yeats in which he reflects on the artist's vocation, or ageing; The Wild Swans at Coole would be a very different poem without Wordworth. I love them both, but think that Wordsworth was certainly the better poet and was knew in a way that Yeats never was.

[JCamilo]

He does not invent the last 2 hundred years of english poetry. He for example, do very little with the celtic twist of english poetry that you find in extremelly representative poets such as Keats, Tennynson or Yeats. That is not Wordsworth invention. He does not go for the mystical which is strongly present in english poetry, he does not came with the narrative dramatic monologue for the likes of Browning.

And he is more influential? Considering that Coleridge's Marineer outsteps the boundaries of poetry until today? The gothic literature owns Coleridge a lot there. And many of ideas in Lyricall Ballads are executed by Wordsworth, but they do belong to Coleridge considerably. Thinking well, the blank verse was even a miltonic return, rather than anything original. Wordsworth as important and as good as he was, does not define a period, movement, etc as Dante. Albeit the question was between him and Yeats and not with the other giants.

[Ecurb]

Comparing the greatness of poets is a bit futile, like asking whether chocolate ice cream is more delicious than lobster. The question is unanswerable. That being said, I’d suggest that (much as I like Wordsworth) Yeats takes second place to very few poets. In addition, he’s just as influential as Wordsworth was. Just as Wordsworth was a seminal figure in the development of Romanticism, Yeats was a seminal figure in the development of Modernism.

Here’s one of Yeats’ most famous poems:


Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Here Yeats predicts not the apolcalypse, but “some revelation”. Christianity is passing away, but it is uncertain what will replace it. Whatever the replacement, it will be a “nightmare” or a “rough beast” to many. The same theme is explored in “The Magi”, where the Three Kings seek, “Being by Calvary's turbulence unsatisfied, The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor."

God has become irrelevant for Yeats – it is the human response that he’s interested in. The “birth” is the nascence of a new world view and ethos.

Here’s another of Yeats’ most famous poems, “Leda and the Swan”


A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

Once again, Yeats is not interested in the divine, but in the human. Zeus (the swan) is only relevant as he affects Leda. “Did she put on his knowledge with his power?” Did she understand history (the burning roof and tower), or merely “feel” it? The poem, set as a series of questions, both asserts the importance of modernism, and questions the efficacy of rationality.

Late in his life, Yeats said, "You can refute Hegel but not the Saint or the Song of Experience." So his work both adumbrates and refutes modernism. Modernism (not so much in the arts as in the sciences) promotes rationality; Yeats promotes the ‘song of experience’. If , even without God, humans are bestial and divine; if Leda experienced both the bestial and divine in her rape; then, “O bodies swayed to music, O brightening glance / How can you know the dancer from the dance.”

[ennison]

Two different minds writing different kinds of poems. Some of Wordsworth is sluggish; some of Yeats nutty. Both wrote some great poetry. I prefer Wordsworth.

[PSRemeshChandra]

William Wordsworth and William Butler Yeats share more similarities than differences in their poetical themes, convictions, ideologies and craft than can be assimilated in a quick glance. Both were lonely souls devoted to nature though almost always surrounded by friends, admirers and the city crowds. One lived in England and the other lived in Ireland which was the only major difference between them. But when the question of who was greater arises, we have to remember the example of Thomas Gray whose scantiness in production gained him eternity as a great poet. While Yeats wrote greater number of poems, Wordsworth wrote the greatest number of poems. Had Wordsworth retained a scantiness in his poems, he certainly and undoubtedly would have secured a loftier position among this trio. Unfortunately, the great body of lesser and inferior poems surrounding his finer creations obstruct the easy access to the literary genius and greatness of this poet. It is like a great jungly mass of surrounding thick grown and saturated weeds and under growth obstructing entry into a secluded beautiful mansion, just as the famous critic and poet Matthew Arnold observed. It is interesing to go through pictured appreciations of The Leech Gatherer and The Lake Isle Of Innisfree here, if anyone wishes.

Articles:

1. The Leech Gatherer: (http://nut.bz/134a-2vx/)
2. The Lake Isle Of Innisfree: (http://nut.bz/19ed-hvz/)

Pictures:

http://reviews.wikinut.com/img/1bjpo_blaec4rasx/Waterfall-and-Stone-Hut-where-the-Poet-wrote-poems

http://reviews.wikinut.com/img/qbldkzzl3znu3uje/The-midlake-abode-of-quietness-and-loneliness.

And perhaps the attached pictures also would help make an insight into the minds of these gifted poets.