What do you think?
Rate this book
The Pocket Yeats
W.B. Yeats ranks among the greatest literary talents of the 19th and 20th centuries, and exerted a remarkable influence in many aspects of Irish life. This volume forms a compact introduction to his life and the events that shaped his work.
256 pages, Hardcover
Published June 13, 2017
3 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
September 4, 2017
Nice introduction to the Irish poet, playwright and nationalist W.B. Yeats. Beautifully edited, but with some awkward typos. And I guess that the author rather sidestepped Yeats' very unbalanced personality, his manic-depressive predisposition. That's strange, because I presume his poetical talent was very influenced by this.
June 17, 2023
For a few years now I have been reading Robert Caro’s masterful and wonderfully written biography of LBJ that comes in four volumes, each of about 500 000 words, and is still not finished: a fifth volume is due. This pocket biography of Yeats could, in contrast, hardly be shorter. But it does give you the shape of Yeats’s and weaves in well his poems, which were very much inspired by his life; it also has good illustrations.
I read the book as we travelled through Ireland by train, boat, and bus, heading towards Sligo, the Irish city most associated with Yeats. https://wordpress.com/post/richardsws... I was roughly familiar with the story of his life but had confused Maud Gonne and Lady Gregory. Gonne was the love of his life, “a spiritual wife” who said she couldn’t tolerate sexual contact but, unknown to Yeats until much later, had two children by her French lover. Yeats loved her for 30 years and repeatedly asked her to marry him. He even asked her daughter to marry him. Gonne, probably correctly, argued that his unrequited love for her was the main inspiration for his poetry. They remained friends for life, although he supported the Treaty, which established the Irish Free State but also partitioned Ireland, and she opposed it. The Free State police searched her home and burned all her letters from Yeats.
Lady Gregory in contrast was not a lover of Yeats but, in Yeats’s words, “she has been to me mother, friend, sister, and brother.” He stayed often at Coole Park, her home, and together they created Irish Theatre. He was “devastated” when she died in 1932, seven years before him.
Sex—both the lack of it and the (possible) excess of it in the autumn of his life—is prominent in Yeats’s biography. Longing for Gonne but being sexually if not spiritually rejected meant that Yeats didn’t lose his virginity until he was 30. Then in 1934, when he was 69, he underwent the Steinach operation, which supposedly rejuvenated old men. Stephen Lock, my predecessor as editor of the BMJ, researched the operation and its effect on Yeats and delivered a paper to the Yeats Society in Sligo. https://www.bmj.com/content/287/6409/... The operation was little more than a vasectomy, but it did the trick for Yeats. He had a series of relationships with much younger women and, more importantly, wrote some of his best poetry—in contrast to many poets—for example, Wordsworth—who fizzle out as they age.
Stephen begins his learned article with this quote:
How can I, that girl standing there,
My attention fix
On Roman or on Russian
Or on Spanish politics ? ...
And maybe what they say is true
Of war and war's alarms
But 0 that I were young again
And held her in my arms!
I read the book as we travelled through Ireland by train, boat, and bus, heading towards Sligo, the Irish city most associated with Yeats. https://wordpress.com/post/richardsws... I was roughly familiar with the story of his life but had confused Maud Gonne and Lady Gregory. Gonne was the love of his life, “a spiritual wife” who said she couldn’t tolerate sexual contact but, unknown to Yeats until much later, had two children by her French lover. Yeats loved her for 30 years and repeatedly asked her to marry him. He even asked her daughter to marry him. Gonne, probably correctly, argued that his unrequited love for her was the main inspiration for his poetry. They remained friends for life, although he supported the Treaty, which established the Irish Free State but also partitioned Ireland, and she opposed it. The Free State police searched her home and burned all her letters from Yeats.
Lady Gregory in contrast was not a lover of Yeats but, in Yeats’s words, “she has been to me mother, friend, sister, and brother.” He stayed often at Coole Park, her home, and together they created Irish Theatre. He was “devastated” when she died in 1932, seven years before him.
Sex—both the lack of it and the (possible) excess of it in the autumn of his life—is prominent in Yeats’s biography. Longing for Gonne but being sexually if not spiritually rejected meant that Yeats didn’t lose his virginity until he was 30. Then in 1934, when he was 69, he underwent the Steinach operation, which supposedly rejuvenated old men. Stephen Lock, my predecessor as editor of the BMJ, researched the operation and its effect on Yeats and delivered a paper to the Yeats Society in Sligo. https://www.bmj.com/content/287/6409/... The operation was little more than a vasectomy, but it did the trick for Yeats. He had a series of relationships with much younger women and, more importantly, wrote some of his best poetry—in contrast to many poets—for example, Wordsworth—who fizzle out as they age.
Stephen begins his learned article with this quote:
How can I, that girl standing there,
My attention fix
On Roman or on Russian
Or on Spanish politics ? ...
And maybe what they say is true
Of war and war's alarms
But 0 that I were young again
And held her in my arms!
October 21, 2017
Handy, if superficial, survey of the writer's life. It is sprinkled with some of his best poetry and served to remind me of a number of details of Yeats' life I'd nearly forgotten after literature studies of decades ago. But for a real grasp of this complex person living in complicated times for Ireland and Europe one needs to revisit the original texts and read a full biography. As a companion to a trip to the west of Ireland and Sligo/Drumcliffe, it was perfect.
September 23, 2017
Intersting bath read, recounting some of the fairly well-known history of Yeats. It is a pocket book and, as such, contains some great poems along with the life story - in case you need to read about Yeats on the move one day.
Irritating error in the timeline with the date of his reinterment, particularly as pages before it was poignantly claimed as post-war.
Irritating error in the timeline with the date of his reinterment, particularly as pages before it was poignantly claimed as post-war.
January 23, 2019
I found the story of Yeats's life interesting. Also, the book includes numerous poems and parts of poems. On the other hand, Biggs's writing is less than perfect: the prose is flat, some facts are repeated several times, and interpretation and summary are lacking. The book reads like an expanded version of a museum brochure.
July 17, 2017
Perfect little book. Text, photos and poetry. Hardback and a little ribbon book marker. :)
Read
February 22, 2024Tread softly and the centre does not hold - time to make sure I know a bit more than that. Nice introduction to his life and work.
March 27, 2026
This took a while to pick up and took a while to finish. He’s missing my favorite poem, so I’m taking away a star.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews