Yeats Now: Echoing Into Life

‘Joseph Hassett has written two powerful and insightful books on W.B. Yeats but this is something new. In a personal, quizzical, imaginative testament he ranges through Yeats’s thought and writings, showcasing and discussing a series of ringing statements, suggestions and aphorisms that evolve into a kind of vade mecum or guide to life. The subjects cover love, anger, friendship, politics, violence and the competing claims of perfecting the life, or the work. The result reminds us that though Yeats claimed the only subjects of interest to an enquiring mind were sex and the dead, his own capacious and enquiring intelligence continued – to adapt his own words – ‘ravening, raging and uprooting that he may come/Into the desolation of reality’. Hassett’s commentary on Yeats’s life and thought is sharply perceptive throughout: empathetic, humorous, and reflecting his own deep immersion in the extraordinary and enduring canon of Yeats’s work. Yeats believed that ‘a poet’s life is an experiment in living’, and Hassett’s book extracts and distils the rich outcome of that experiment. It is a work of personal engagement that will strike a chord with everyone who cares for Yeats, and anyone who loves poetry.’ – Roy Foster

‘Hassett seeks always to restore the full poetic and personal context to many famous lines. … The result is one of the most beautiful and enjoyable books on Yeats ever to call forth the skills of a gifted designer [a]nd of a true critic …’ ‘Hence the exactitude of the title Yeats Now. He may be a poet for all time, but his wisdom is surely needed in our time.’ ‘Part of its charm is Joe Hassett’s gift for brief, pointed, surprising comparisons – with Joyce and Beckett – which have the effect of amplifying Yeats’s lines; but it engages us also by the ways in which his deft quotations seem to encourage the reader to link a line from the poetry with one remembered from the prose.’ ‘Lucky Yeats … in having an interpreter as relaxed, authoritative and tender as Joseph Hassett.’ – Declan Kiberd, Dublin Review of Books

‘subtle and often illuminating study of what we can learn from Yeats … and how we can let his words echo in our own lives’ ‘Hassett’s lively gleanings of Yeats’s wisdom, arranged in categories such as Marrying, Working, Making Your Soul and Facing Death, are a delight to read, reminding us once again, as if needed, of Yeats’s hard- won and lapidary insights into the nature of life, death, love and friendship.’ ‘Hassett is an uncommonly acute and insightful reader of poetry, highly attuned to the noise made by the poem. He hones in on how Yeats’s words echo through many of the poems of his successors …’ —Michael O’Loughlin, The Irish Times