About the Book
In Running to Paradise, M.L. Rosenthal, hailed by the Times Literary Supplement as "one of the most important critics of twentieth-century poetry," leads us through the lyric poetry and poetic drama of our century's greatest poet in English. His readings shed new, vivid light on Yeats's daring uses of tradition, his love poetry, and the way he faced the often tragic realities of revolution and civil war. Running to Paradise describes
Yeats's whole effort--sometimes leavened by wild humor--to convey, with high poetic integrity, his passionate sense of his own life and of his chaotic era. Himself a noted poet, Rosenthal stresses Yeats's artistry and
psychological candor. The book ranges from his early exquisite lyrical poems and folklore-rooted plays, through the tougher-minded, more confessional mature work (including the sublime achievement of The Tower), and then to the sometimes "mad" yet often brilliant tragic or comic writing of his last years. Quoting extensively from Yeats, Rosenthal charts the gathering force with which the poet confronted his major life-issues: his art's demands, his persistent but hopeless love for one
woman, the complexities of marriage to another woman at age 52, and his distress during Ireland's "Troubles." Yeats's deep absorption in female sensibility, in the cycles of history and human thought, and in
supernaturalism and "the dead" comes strongly into play as well.
About the Author :
M.L. Rosenthal was Professor Emeritus at New York University and lectured and read around the world. His many books include The Modern Poets: A Critical Introduction, The Modern Poetic Sequence: The Genius of Modern Poetry (with Sally M. Gall) The Poet's Art, and Our Life in Poetry, and As for Love: Poems and Translations.
Review :
"The fruit of a lifetime studying and teaching Yeats, Running to Paradise offers a provocative commentary on the poetry and drama. A poet as well as an internationally renowned scholar, Rosenthal not only discloses the essential ideas in Yeats's work, but also demonstrates how those concepts are embedded in the texture of the verse itself. The volume is also a welcome reaffirmation that significant literary criticism need not be couched in the language
of a coterie. Written in a style at once elegant and accessible, Running to Paradise is an essential companion to Yeats's poe ms and plays."--Richard J. Finneran, Editor, An Annual of Critical and Textual
Studies
"M. L. Rosenthal's deeply rewarding consideration of Yeats's lyric poetry and poetic drama emphasizes the interdependence of his artistic and intellectual growth....Rosenthal's stress on group linkages and sequences [allows] the reader to experience the poetry in terms of a total organic design....[Yeats's] soaring achievement has been rendered here in prose that is clear, eloquent, and accessible."--The Boston Globe
"Confirms yet again [Rosenthal's] position as our country's most eloquent critic of poetry. This brilliant study of a towering figure could only have been written by a passionate reader who is himself a gifted poet."--Joel Conarroe, author of Six American Poets
"Yeats is usually thought of as a poet of masterpieces, brilliant and perfect lyrics. And so he is, but M.L. Rosenthal shows that Yeats is something more--the author of lyrical sequences, groups of poems 'having an organic reciprocity similar to that of the parts of a single lyric poem.' He shows how the poet's ideas a re developed from one stage to another, and that over Yeats's lifetime his poems and plays form a coherent and massive whole--a
twentieth-century Divine Comedy. Running to Paradise enlarges our understanding of Yeats. It is an indispensable study of a great poet--no other writer has appoached the4 subject from this point of view."--Louis
Simpson
"Rosenthal offers a close, sensitive reading of Yeats's major poems and plays. Proceeding chronologically through the entire oeuvre, Rosenthal, a poet and professor emeritus at New York University, explores the relations between poems and between volumes, identifying poetic sequences and tracing the path of Yeats's career....Even specialists will be impressed by the insight and responsiveness of the readings, while the abundant quotations from the poems and
plays (hardly a page quotes fewer than ten lines of verse) makes this study especially valuable for those less familiar with the poet. Recommended for academic libraries."--Library Journal
"Flying, as ever, in the face of literary fashion (except as it is genuine and genuinely new), M.L. Rosenthal in Running to Paradise plants us squarely in the middle of splendidly alive poetry. There, through a celebration of the distinctive, developing quality that is Yeats, Rosenthal reminds us of the unique, profoundly relevant pleasure that is poetry. For all that has happened to criticism these last years, this book, for its interest and emphasis,
must be considered novel, not to say revolutionary."--Theodore Weiss, Editor, Quarterly Review of Literature
"The fruit of a lifetime studying and teaching Yeats, Running to Paradise offers a provocative commentary on the poetry and drama. A poet as well as an internationally renowned scholar, Rosenthal not only discloses the essential ideas in Yeats's work, but also demonstrates how those concepts are embedded in the texture of the verse itself. The volume is also a welcome reaffirmation that significant literary criticism need not be couched in the language
of a coterie. Written in a style at once elegant and accessible, Running to Paradise is an essential companion to Yeats's poemms and plays."--Richard J. Finneran, Editor, An Annual of Critical and Textual
Studies
