The Book of Yeats's Poems » (ON DEMAND)

In the most ambitious work on Yeats in two decades, Hazard Adams undertakes a study of all the poems Yeats wished to include in his volume of collected poetry, and he reveals a canon organized to tell a dramatic-mimetic story. Not only in the poems, but in the spaces between, Adams finds the created life of the fictive poet named Yeats--shaped, over the years, as the author Yeats revised and ordered his poems to tell this story.

Adams's is the first sustained, poem-by-poem study of the significance of the order of Yeats's complete works. While providing a comprehensive, insightful reading of the poems, Adams's commentary is always thoroughly informed by the current theoretical, critical, and scholarly debates surrounding both the text of Yeats's poems and the nature of textuality itself.

While Adams writes for the informed reader, his style remains always accessible and persuasive, and his arguments lucid, precise, and comprehensive. If each generation of readers must interpret the great poets for itself, Adams has given this generation its quintessential guide to Yeats.