Yeats's Poetic Codes
A new approach to Yeats's poems, concentrating on the reading experience itself. By picking out the distinctive 'codes' of Yeats's poetic practice, such as his use of dates and place names, characteristic vocabulary, and stylistic preferences, Grene's study will send readers back to the work with a new sense of understanding and enjoyment.
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Nicholas Grene explores Yeats's poetic codes of practice, the key words and habits of speech that shape the reading experience of his poetry. Where previous studies have sought to decode his work, expounding its symbolic meanings by references to Yeats's occult beliefs, philosophical ideas or political ideology, the focus here is on his poetic technique, its typical forms and their implications for the understanding of the poems. The book illuminates the distinctive stylistic signatures of the Collected Poems: the use of dates and place-names within individual poems; the handling of demonstratives and of grammatical tense and mood; certain nodal Yeatsian words ('dream', 'bitter', 'sweet') and images (birds and beasts); dialogue and monologue as the voices of his dramatic lyrics. Yeats's Poetic Codes enables the general reader as well as the specialist to go back to the poems with a fresh sense of understanding and enjoyment.
