Divining Poets: Yeats

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) is Ireland’s greatest poet and one of the finest poets of the 20th century. Yeats maintained an interest in Irish legends and heroes throughout his work, emphasizing imagination and energy, with a particular eye on the occult. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923. Poet and critic Paul Muldoon is originally from Northern Ireland. Formerly poetry editor of The New Yorker, he is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His poetry awards include the Pulitzer Prize and the Griffin Poetry Prize for Moy Sand and Gravel. He teaches writing at Princeton and lives in Manhattan and Sharon Springs, New York.

Praise for W.B. Yeats:"[Yeats is] one of those few whose history is the history of their own time, who are part of the consciousness of an age which cannot be understood without them." —T.S. Eliot"Yeats’s lines work outside their context because the word pairings are brilliant in and of themselves.” —The Paris Review"[He encourages us] to be more resolutely and abundantly alive, whatever the conditions." —Seamus Heaney"Not only is he the most quoted poet globally, but his work has appeared in every genre of the arts: opera, folk music, jazz, film, theatre, poetry, art and literature." —The Irish Times Praise for Paul Muldoon:“[Muldoon is] one of the great poets of the past hundred years, who can be everything in his poems – word-playful, lyrical, hilarious, melancholy. And angry. Only Yeats before him could write with such measured fury.” —Roger Rosenblatt, The New York Times Book Review