Collected Poems
Description
About the BookCollected Poem.
Sylvia
Plath died in 1963, and even now her outsize persona threatens to bury
her poetry--the numerous biographies and studies often drawing the
reader toward anecdote and away from the work. It's a relief to turn to
the poems themselves and once more be jolted by their strange beauty,
hard-wrought originality, and acetylene anger. "It is a heart, / This
holocaust I walk in, / O golden child the world will kill and eat."
While the juvenilia and poems written before 1960 that Ted Hughes has
included here prefigure Plath's later obsessions, they also enable us to
witness her turn from thesaurus-heavy verse to stripped-down art as
they gather power through raw simplicity. "The blood jet is poetry. /
There is no stopping it," she declares in "Kindness."
About the AuthorWilliam Butler Yeats, 1865-1939
Irish
poet and dramatist and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century
literature. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival,
and founded the Abbey Theatre, and served as its chief during its early
years. In 1923, he was awarded a Nobel Prize in Literature for what the
Nobel Committee described as "inspired poetry, which in a highly
artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation;" and he
was the first Irishman so honored. Yeats is generally considered one of
the few writers whose greatest works were completed after being awarded
the Nobel Prize; such works include The Tower [1928] and The Winding
Stair and Other Poems (1929).
Yeats
was born and educated in Dublin, but spent his childhood in County
Sligo. He studied poetry in his youth, and from an early age was
fascinated by both Irish legends and the occult. Those topics feature in
the first phase of his work, which lasted roughly until the turn of the
century. His earliest volume of verse was published in 1889, and those
slowly paced and lyrical poems display debts to Edmund Spenser and Percy
Bysshe Shelley, as well as to the lyricism of the Pre-Raphaelite poets.
From
1900, Yeats' poetry grew more physical and realistic. He largely
renounced the transcendental beliefs of his youth, though he remained
preoccupied with physical and spiritual masks, as well as with cyclical
theories of life. Over the years, Yeats adopted many different
ideological positions, including, in the words of the critic Michael
Valdez Moses, "those of radical nationalist, classical liberal,
reactionary conservative and millenarian nihilist".
