who is greater Yeats or Keats?

who is greater Yeats or Keats?

Despite the similarity of names, they are entirely different and very difficult to compare. I love both, but would choose Yeats as the better, but that is based only on personal preference.

Keats wrote peotry for 5 years. Yeats for more than 50. It seems unfair to compare their works.

Kyeats all the way.

It's very close... I think they were equally talented, but considering that Yeats wrote so much more I think I have to give him the edge. Although, fwiw, I think Keats' best is better than Yeats' best.

I actually really like both, for various reasons (they obviously wrote during different times and in different styles). I own a compilation of Keats' poetry, whereas I do not own any of Yeats (but this does not mean I deem the former better than the latter). However, since I tend to like poetry of the romanticism era better, I may have to vote for Keats... though some of the most memorable lines of poetry (for me) were written by Yeats ...

Keats all the way.

They were both great, but Keats is my personal favorite.

I like them both and hate to compare. I probably like Yeats a little better, but I suspect that as far as pure genius goes, Keats has the edge. His poem "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" is one of my very favorite poems. It gives me goosebumps every time I read it. Yeats, on the other hand, has "When You are Old," and "The Second Coming" and you know what? Let's don't compare and say we did. :)

They're both greats and I'm not too sure which is the 'greatest' but I'd say Yeats is my personal favourite.



The quarrel of the sparrows in the eaves,
The full round moon and the star-laden sky,
And the loud song of the ever-singing leaves,
Had hid away earth's old and weary cry.

And then you came with those red mournful lips,
And with you came the whole of the world's tears,
And all the sorrows of her labouring ships,
And all the burden of her myriad years.

And now the sparrows warring in the eaves,
The curd-pale moon, the white stars in the sky,
And the loud chaunting of the unquiet leaves
Are shaken with earth's old and weary cry.

I'm tempted to use the Mozart Defense when it comes to Keats, meaning that I believe if he had lived longer he likely would've been the greatest poet that ever lived, and the fact that he's still in the conversation when talking about the greatest is all the more reason to think he would've gotten even better. As I said in another thread, he basically perfected lyric form in his last year, and had already developed one of the most sophisticated aesthetic philosophies, even if on an intuitive level, that there ever was. Had he lived, I think he would've been a real challenge to Milton, Shakespeare, and Chaucer. As is, I think he's firmly on that second-tier with the likes of Donne, Blake, and Yeats, and I really think it's hard to pick definitively between them.

Why are they being compared? Because their names are different by one letter?

I'm going to hijack this Keats' preferred thread to wish Yeats a happy birthday!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2FT4...feature=fvwrel

I'm tempted to use the Mozart Defense when it comes to Keats, meaning that I believe if he had lived longer he likely would've been the greatest poet that ever lived, and the fact that he's still in the conversation when talking about the greatest is all the more reason to think he would've gotten even better. As I said in another thread, he basically perfected lyric form in his last year, and had already developed one of the most sophisticated aesthetic philosophies, even if on an intuitive level, that there ever was. Had he lived, I think he would've been a real challenge to Milton, Shakespeare, and Chaucer. As is, I think he's firmly on that second-tier with the likes of Donne, Blake, and Yeats, and I really think it's hard to pick definitively between them.

I largely agree... although perhaps the Schubert or Pergolesi Defense might be a better analogy as Mozart in spite of his early death quite clearly stands at the pinnacle of classical music with only J.S. Bach clearly above him. But yes... Keats was an unrivaled prodigy. If one considers his letters as well as his poetry, which T.S. Eliot defined as "the most notable and most important ever written by any English poet," he is even more impressive. One is awed to recognize that Keats had barely reached maturity. Today he would have still been a student... perhaps just beginning graduate school. Only Rimbaud comes close. One can't imagine another writer who might have achieved more had he or she been afforded another decade.

I've always been struck by the poetic fragment from one of Keat's final letters:

This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calmed- see, here it is-
I hold it towards you.

These were perhaps the last lines of serious poetry ever penned by Keats who was already dying of tuberculosis. He must have been truly aware that what he was suggesting... the poet's own death... the fact of the warm hand soon being reduced to the icy lifeless thing of the grave... was no mere poet's conceit. Poetry is full of such similar suggestions: You will regret it when I'm gone. Pick the flowers while ye may... "Quand vous serez bien vielle..." "When you are old and sitting by the fire..." Yet what power Keat's fragment has... he stretches his hand out to his reader... and to you... in the terrifying knowledge that such death... such absence of the poet is not an abstraction... something far off (presumably)... but an immediate reality.

Excellent post, St. Luke. I had nearly forgotten that fragment, but reading it along with your commentary, I doubt I'll forget it again!

FWIW, the reason I called it the "Mozart Defense" is that I've had the Beethoven/Bach/Mozart discussion more than once, and I always bring up, in Mozart's defense, that he had 20 years less than Beethoven and 30 years less than Bach to reach the level of greatness he did, and, had he lived another few decades, I don't think there would've been any need for the discussion. The notion of Mozart writing after the age of the Eroica and Fifth is a stunning thought given his unparalleled gift for assimilating every musical style he encountered into his own work. But you're right that the Schubert/Keats comparison is more analogous.