How Great is Yeats?

[whitman]

How Great is Yeats?-what made him so great?

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

He's pretty great. He was an awesome poet. That made him pretty great.

[The Comedian]

Well, that's hard to say. Some people believe that Yeats is of the first rank: Shakespeare, Milton, . . . in terms of his command of verse, linguistic control, and poetic development.

You should try to read him. I really enjoy him -- his collected works is one that I turn to from time to time.

ST

[plath]

I think Yeats is considered great firstly because of his compositional skills. Mentored by Lady Augusta Gregory, Yeats spent years practising his writing, refining himself and taking influence from other writers as far back as Shakespeare, Keats and contemporaries like Ezra Pound, etc.

The progression of his poetic subject matter really intrigues me. From the whimsical Irish folktales to passionate love poems, to more elegiac stylings (September 1913, Easter 1916) to the middle eastern/fascist dalliances of his later life, Yeats has a vibrant repertoire which I think is one of the reasons he remains so popular!

Interesting though, how his plays are pretty dire, yet his poetry is so brilliant!

[JBI]

perfection of style, diction and content.

[MorpheusSandman]

Get Helen Vendler's book on Yeats; I think she covers the vast terrain of what makes Yeats so great. First and foremost, he was a master of lyric form. He new how to exploit whatever form he wrote in to its utmost expressive possibility. He also had an uncanny ability to marry so many polar worlds: the mythological/spiritual and the everyday, the sensuous, emotional, and intellectual, etc. He could write in a variety of voices and tones, he had a supreme command over diction, rhythm, and sound, and he actually had interesting things to say on top of all that. To me, it's really down to him and Donne as the best lyric poets.

[ShadowsCool]

In a word, Great!