Norman MacCaig

Norman MacCaig was not one of the later additions to the Anthology, still being remembered in the time after the first names went in. He was among the first names. Most timely it was, though, having been back through the Collected to decide which three of his go in, that BBC4 saw fit to show a couple of old programmes from the archives late last night. There might not be vast amounts of such material stored away and we might have seen much of it but it is good use made of minority air time.

The two programmes used a lot of the same pieces of film of him, there not being much. He came across as rather more pleased with himself than I remembered but those who are 'any good' have some right to do that. Perhaps his main achievement, that allowed the writing of his impressive body of work, was throwing away his first two books of inaccessible poems at the age of 37. It allowed him to become one of the names worth preserving from C20th poetry for the fine example he set.

He is an extreme instance of a poet whose later work was very different from where he began. It wasn't a matter of 'development', though. He started all over again. One can entertain oneself by thinking of different ways in which there can be said to be 'two kinds of poet'.

Those who change significantly and those who don't change much is one. Betting without MacCaig who disowned the poet he had been and successfully re-invented himself as a better one, my long-standing guru of all such things, Thom Gunn, turned around completely from the strictly metrical poems that often found the individual at odds or feeling separate from the world to free verse and the discovery of community with others- to put it mildly.  That he could do both and achieved some synthesis between those two polar opposite ways of working is what ultimately made him as great as he was.

There is a shift in Larkin, elsewhere identified as a 'hardening of the arteries', that does him no favours, but he hasn't changed beyond recognition. Yeats is re-made from Romantic to Modernist. Hughes moves from the capturing of the natural world into less successful mythical excursions. Sylvia gains in intensity but obviously finishes before we can see where her extraordinary talent might have led.

Whereas, I'm not sure that Hardy's poems are any different from first to last except that the return to poems, from novels, was in some ways a bigger move. 

 

Formal metre and rhyme v. free verse is perhaps the most obvious divide but surely, surely, it's better to do both as and when while it's not wrong to be one or the other. Although those never attempting some sort of formal discipline need, for me, to be convincing in their chosen relaxations or else we might think they can't do it.

Timothy Steele's metronomic metre was doctrinal, seemingly as important to him as anything he had to say while using it. At its worst, the far worse alternative is that described by Jane Greer, quoted here at Anecdotal Evidence , where in poetry terms the cart has been put before the horse, the art has been sacrificed for a course of unmitigated self-indulgence and stretches the definition of what poetry is. It can be poetry if it wants to be in the same way that I can be a snooker player if I want to say I am. But I'm no good at snooker and the poets to who Jane was referring are bad poets.

 

Some years ago I introduced a session at Portsmouth Poetry Society to try to see if there was a difference between poetry written by male and female poets. It wasn't envisaged that an outright answer would be arrived at but I hoped that the point was that 'poetry' was about the putting together of nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc. and that both genders did that. Since then, I've found that there are by now 72 other genders and so the question has become considerably more complicated but at least it will be simplified again once Donald Trump has established a right-wing hegemony across much more than the share of the world he was elected to manage and the number is reduced back to two, or maybe one and a half.

I hope it doesn't in any way associate me with him if I suggest that the art of writing is genderless and not to be weaponized by either misogynist Republicans or feminism.

 

There are possible divides between perceived Classical/Romantic; something purportedly impersonal and objective v. autobiographical and 'confessional'; light verse and its opposite; highbrow/lowbrow/middlebrow; poems to hear out loud or those for the page. Tragical, Historical, Pastoral.

I'm sure we would all love to see the Venn diagram that placed poets on the complex map, accurately categorized, and where we and everybody else was on it so that we could complain that it was wrong. But the art of a rambling item like this is to make it look as if one knew where one was going with it. Norman MacCaig openly admitted he didn't know where his poems were going while he was writing them and they didn't get titles until they were done and he could see where he had arrived.

I'd be glad to be somewhere near him on the Venn diagram once it's done.  

British Poetry 2000-2020

 I have been noticing how we've already had twenty years of the C21st. It might not seem like it but a fifth of it's been done. Those of us who still think our subject is C20th Poetry had better give that further thought. I wonder if anybody's doing the 'definitive' anthology of the period to put alongside The New Poetry, the Motion/Morrison book, the other New Poetry and Identity Parade, if that counts, if any of them still count, if anybody is still permitted the idea of a canon. A little while back we were being told it was being abolished, that Shakespeare and Kate Tempest are both as worthy of our attention as each other. In some schools, in the generation after mine, school teams were picked on a rota basis rather than with a view to winning matches so they probably weren't as good as the teams I played in but with regard to poetry it does depend on somebody knowing which poems are better than others and, as a look through some old Poetry Review magazines showed a while back, that became more a matter of tribalism and old 'poetry wars' but maybe it was ever thus and at least each offered a point of view.

But, twenty years in, I have been comparing the first two decades of the C21st with those of the C20th. Without looking it all up, 1900-1920 seemed to be major in a major way with names like Thomas Hardy, W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot and Edward Thomas, notwithstanding Wilfred Owen and reportage from WW1, and women like H.D. and Mina Loy at the forefront of Modernism, which was as big a revolution as any one cares to mention, but by all means provide your own names. Romanticism had made the individual and their preciousness a priority and after 200 years we don't seem to have recovered from that. The incoming French influence into English made Chaucer very different from Old English. The first Elizabethan Age is sold as a high point in English poetry. 

British. English meaning from England. English meaning 'in the English language'. Anybody needs to set their parameters but the barricades are largely down by now and it's Poetry and many of us aren't fluent enough in other languages to appreciate poetry in them sufficiently.

But 1900-1920 must have been an exciting time, with bad, old Ezra, the Dominic Cummings of English letters, showing everybody how it should be done henceforth. In retrospect, it looks like it, and then one looks to find what 2000-2020 have to offer.

Michael Donaghy was born in 1954 but died in 2004, much too soon, which already means that the 2000-2020 are like Argentina without Maradona. Paul Muldoon was perhaps at the height of his powers with Incantata in The Annals of Chile in 1994 and Hay in 1998 but subsequently proceeded to become more Muldonian than even he needed to be. Sean O'Brien has continued to provide powerful, highly accomplished commentary on what appear to be increasingly troubled times but despite an extensive list of highly talented poets writing in English - some of them in America and many in Ireland- he can't be expected to do it all on his own. There is much to be admired in the poetry of John Burnside, Carol Ann Duffy, Julia Copus, David Harsent, Don Paterson, the much-missed Roddy Lumsden -and I apologize to all the others I don't mention but this is a short essay rather than a directory - but it still doesn't feel like a period. It might be a good thing that it doesn't but the unfashionable idea of being 'great', like Bach or Mozart, meant taking the art to 'the next level' (for want of a better phrase).

If Roddy were still with us, he might defend his assertion that the current generation of new poets, a few years ago, were the best in the history of English poetry but it raised some eyebrows here if nowhere else, looking a bit like blurb for a generation he had done much to teach how to continue with ludic, Muldonian allusiveness. Nothing goes out of fashion quite as quickly as the avant-garde but all innovation contributes to the mainstream if it's worth taking in. (There we go. I haven't said it for a while so it was time I said it again).

I don't know if the Creative Writing industry has made poets so clever and self-aware that it has brought about some sort of ultra-plural paralysis, whether a liberal inclusiveness has not allowed anything to be regarded as 'elite' any more but, supposing there is an Eng Lit syllabus in unversities in 2100-2120, something is going to have to be on the reading list for the Poetry of the Early C21st. Or, isn't it. It won't all be Theory by then because even Terry Eagleton seems to have accepted that it isn't all Theory even now.

I was as dubious as any campus academic a few years ago when I heard it said of the Romantic Poets that 'there were six of them' and that's what happens when you have a syllabus or a canon but while contemporary poetry still has fine work in it, one can't help thinking that, like pop music, it doesn't have its Motown, Beatles, Prince, Bowie galaxy of impossibly great satars any more. On the other hand, one notices on University Challenge that when the music round consists of pieces of popular music to identify, a team with an average age of 20 listen to Roxy Music with blank looks. They know the festival artists of their generation well enough so perhaps those of us who thought poetry was about Eliot, Auden, Elizabeth Bishop and Larkin need to move over. It might have been our game once but it doesn't remain so forever.  

Tamer and Hawk and other hawks

The Gunn book was supposed to be something to do once I finish full-time work but I've got no more idea when that will be than you have. I thought I'd make some notes by way of preparation and it starts to look as if I might be able to do it. There's surely plenty to say and there is enough biography and autobiography already in print to lift. I mean 'cite'. All it needs is organizing, which is the enjoyable bit; and then writing, which is the drudgery where it might falter.
But I itched to get a few words done and was taken with this idea of where to start. If the  book is never completed, at least this note makes a minor contribution to Gunn Studies.

--

Tamer and Hawk, in Thom Gunn's first book of poems, Fighting Terms, published in 1954, is the early masterpiece.
Whereas Yeats's
        falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

is a hawk symbolic of lost connection, dysfunction and resulting anarchy, in The Second Coming,

and Gerard Manley Hopkins's Windhover is,
             this morning, morning's, king-
dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding 
Of the rolling underneath him steady air,

and dedicated To Christ our Lord, the wonder of nature being implicit evidence of the presence of God,


and Ted Hughes's first book, The Hawk in the Rain begins with the poem of that title before he continues in Lupercal with Hawk Roosting and its masterful bird with,
                 no falsifying dream
Between my hooked head and hooked feet:
Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.

Gunn's hawk is joined to its tamer in a symbiotic relationship of mutual control and sensual, limited freedom.
It was unfortunate that Gunn and Hughes were published together in the joint Selected Poems by Faber in 1962 because it led them to be inappropriately bracketed together on account of perceived themes of machismo and violence. Had Philip Larkin been included in a three-way Selected, which proved not possible due to Larkin's copyright agreement at the time, it might not have looked like that. It would have been more apparent that Gunn occupied a more central attitude between the 'gentility' in Larkin detected and derided by Al Alvarez in his introduction to The New Poetry, also from 1962, and the 'risk-taking' of Hughes that he so admired. It was Hughes that knew the difference and later pointed out that Gunn was 'a poet of gentleness'.

 --

So that's 284 words. Including quotes. It took some checking to make sure it's right because it has to be because if you get one thing wrong, somebody will find it. In other people's books, that might be me. And it might not even be right and I'm not sure where the Hughes quote first appeared.
It could be a long job but the days will need filling with some sort of job. 

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

Bishop's Court
Yanworth
The World's End
Gardefort

is not the beginning of the Contents page of my next booklet of poems. No, it's the honourable roll call of today's horses that obliged in a yankee to put the world back to rights after last weekend's debacle. Four out of four in a yankee is not unheard of and can happen from time to time. The first time it happened to me, circa 1983, I thought I'd been touched by a miracle whereas tonight I'll only be looking out for the blue moon.
Brenda Maddox's George's Ghosts is a fine account of W.B.Yeats but had to be put on hold when another book turned up. Her summation of Yeats as 'scatty and splendid' looks very fair, if not charitable. His regard for the 'Eliot-Auden camp' as one of 'bleak mundanity' is aloof and, like many poets, he doesn't come across as immediately attractive. 'Dubious' would be appropriate as he moves from one set of reasons to be doubtful about him to others. I think I'd have liked Larkin but in most cases readers are drawn in, like Shakespeare admirers, to assume the best about poets on account of their poetry. That is probably a bad idea.
Brenda's book was temporarily left to one side because of an enthusiatic recommendation from a colleague for Francis Wheen's Strange Days Indeed (2009), a riveting study of 1970's paranoia in high places from Richard Nixon, through Harold Wilson to Idi Amin and the proliferation of terroroist groups and Prada Meinhoff chic. Was it really like that as we lived through glam rock, Bowie and punk. Well, yes, it apparently was and maybe it is like that most of the time. It might be more unusual to find a decade in which mundanity was the prevailing atmosphere and see if we preferred it.
I can only pass on the recommendation and thank the person who lent it to me, having found it in an Oxfam shop.

And now for a game of Which One's Diderich?

Buxtehude mania didn't end with my Christmas acquisition of the Opera Omnia but has proved a springboard to even greater things, now in possession of the t-shirt that I wore for last week's poetry reading; the definitive volume by Kerala J. Snyder now on order and various options on the print here under close consideration.
But whereas I had taken it that this group portrait only 'possibly' included Dietrich and he is the one draping himself over the keyboard in thoughtful repose, it now turns out he's playing the viol. If only the technology had been available to him, perhaps he could have played all the instruments, like Prince, but I doubt if he could have sung Klag Lied to his own satisfaction.

Meanwhile, I must press on with Time After Time, the novel written for the sake of writing a novel. My character, Des, needs to finish his epic 12 Hour ride by the end of chapter 9 and then I only have chapter 10 to do. Riding a twelve and writing a novel are similar enterprises, not to be undertaken lightly, and I'll be glad to be in a position to say I've done both, neither of them particularly well, and not have to do either of them again. 
   

Let there be less of it

Having been most disgruntled by Richard Ellman's biography of Yeats, I've had Brenda Maddox's George's Ghosts waiting to be looked at to see if she provides a more coherent account of the life rather than a detailed exegesis of all the supernatural baloney that he involved himself in.
It was a close run thing in the early pages and Yeats was nearly abandoned as a lost cause but I persevered long enough for the book to convince that it is a sane and useful document of the life, personality and relationships and it is most welcome.

With Buxtehude proving a hugely enjoyable companion, mostly in the choral works, as I come to the end of a firrst run through of the 29 disc set of Opera Omnia, the next stage is to retrace my way back through some highlights noted on the way and read more of the booklets and text to formulate a clearer idea of the oeuvre. It is a case of instinctively knowing what is right and not for one minute has it seemed like an overdue extravagance to blow most of last year's horse racing profit on such an investment.

It has also meant a period of restraiut in ordering books and records while I catch up with this backlog of essential reading and listening. January has been a record low point for acquisitions with only one disc arriving, af fortepiano and viola da gamba pieces by C.P.E. Bach, and I surprised myself by ordering the paperback of David Starkey's television series on Music and Monarchy, in which he has been gentle with us, informed and sensible in his telling of the composers who wrote and played for the British royals.

But a considerable list is accumulating of further requirements and, in preparation for next year's biography of Charlotte Mew by Julia Copus, a collected Mew will be necessary; there's piano concertos by Leopold Kozeluch, which could be Mozart in disguise; I see that we are due some Simon Armitage poems in March, which is also when The Magnetic Fields' 50 Song Memoir reveals its rich cargo and that is without essentials such as volume three of Danny Baker's memoirs, Sean O'Brien's stories in Quartier Perdu and the very long awaited Clive Wilmer's selection of Thom Gunn. Luckily, the last few days have seen some horses doing the required business to pay for them.

But there are events to mention, too, for anyone in their vicinities. Feb 11th is Pauline Hawkesworth's book launch, with a supporting cast of readers from Portsmouth Poetry Society (see below), of which I'm delighted to be one; The Jess Davies Band have a date forthcoming in Southsea in March, where it's possible one or two songs in the set might be co-authored by me and, further ahead in July, and different again, my nephew goes straight into time-trialling at the deep end, with plans to ride the Welsh CA 12 Hour, which now incorporates the WTTA event that I used to ride in the 1990's, in the Monmouth area for which I will be glad to support and advise in the inevitable obliteration of the one family cycling record I ever held.

So, while there is plenty to be involved with, and I can report that Time After Time, my novel about club cycling in 1969, is 78% done in its first and only draft, and will be ready to be printed off, photographed and then put away in a drawer, there is likely to be less of this internet broadcasting. It's not good for me and it might be better for those who read it if I do less of it and appear no more than once a week or when there is something worth the saying.       

A Survey of Contemporary Poetry

I'm not going to attempt such a thing. Good grief, no. I was led to thinking how difficult it would be to undertake, being so close to it, being a small part of a small part of it and not all of it being visible to any individual.
One might begin with the famous names from the big publishing houses, the 'mainstream' poets who we imagine might represent our age in a hundred years' time- Don Paterson, Paul Muldoon, Carol Ann Duffy, Sean O'Brien, we might think, although posterity sometimes sees things differently. And then there'd be the local groups and activity in London. Oxford and the provinces, as well as the dedicated schools of avant garde manifesto-makers beleaguered in their stolid doctrines, plus the magazines, competitions and, perhaps most important of all, the individual readers and writers doing their own thing to their own satisfaction without troubling anybody else with it.
I wouldn't know where to start but one of my own windows onto this disparate galaxy of far-flung stars and solar sysytems is Clarissa Aykroyd's The Stone and the Star, here, http://thestoneandthestar.blogspot.co.uk/  
and in particular her Blog List from which you can scan the latest posts by those she follows, which I'm gratified to be included in.
Today I followed up Anthony Wilson and his thoughts on his 'Go-to' poets. His list comprises Norman MacCaig, Heaney, Elizabeth Bishop, Tomas Transtromer as well as quoting Auden on Marianne Moore and it is so immaculate that I thought that any other poet he mentions must be worthwhile by association. I had never heard of Marie Howe but I was immediately off in search of her books. There is not apparently a Selected as yet and so I'll start with the most recent and let you know how it goes.
--
Otherwise, a new influx of books is due after a session of indulgent clicking away, irresponsibly just ahead of when I'm asked what I want for my birthday and I have to say I've just ordered a pile of records so I don't know.
I've begun George Gissing's The Nether World in preference to the breeze block that is Ben Pimlott's biography of Harold Wiilson. I can't believe I'll be ploughing through that line by line but it will be one to dip into although sadly the index leads us to not much on Jeremy Thorpe.
These follow the short anthology of memoirs about Joyce in The Joyce We Knew by Ulick O'Connor, which confirms at first hand much of what we thought we knew about the aloof, half-blind genius with a fine tenor voice, and the New Grove North European Baroque Masters for its brief biography and catalogue of works of Buxtehude.
Also on their way, alongside a selection of versions of Couperin's Lecons de Tenebres to compare with the latest new recording, are Elizabeth Foyster's The Trials of the King of Hampshire, Barney Curley's old autobiography finally found cheap enough and George's Ghosts, a biography of Yeats by Brenda Maddox. The Ellman account of Yeats was so unsatisfactory that I thought he deserved another chance. Brenda's book on Nora Barnacle was excellent and so if she can't make Yeats interesting, I'll have to assume it his fault after all.
So, with the Saturday Nap due to take us up to Boxing Day with horse racing advice of the most dubious provenance and the assessments of the Year's Best in all the usual categories, it is worth noting- should you be interested- that I only went away for a couple of weeks and I'm back here like a rearguard action, trying to show that the blog (although I'm old-fashioned and call this a website) is not a thing of the past.

Oh, Yeats, What Would You Say

I'm not much more the wiser in my attempt to understand W.B. Yeats better. I thought there must be more to it than Celtic Twilight, mysticism and then Ezra Pound makes a poet out of him but on the evidence of Richard Ellman's Yeats, the Man and the Masks, perhaps not.
I had thought that Ellman was a standard text on the issue but hadn't realized it was published in 1948. It is a 'critical biography', written well before the fashion in literary biography became more a set of anecdotes designed to describe the poet in relation to their work. Ellman explains in some detail how Yeats' thoughts on theosophy, the occult, mysticism, nationalism and philosophy informed his plays and poems but he says nowhere near as much as we would now expect about his life, the relationshiops with Maud Gonne, his wife, Pound and other writers. We are left with the impression that there wasn't much more to him than these thoughts, maybe there wasn't. But while we need to read Ellman in the light of how biography was done in the 1940's, we also need to understand Yeats in the context of the fin de siecle.
While his interest in seances, automatic writing and the elaborate systems of the theories he devised look madcap to us now, or to me at least, it is difficult to blame anybody for taking up ideas that were fashionable at the time, like a lot of 1970's campus marxists.
One can sympathize with some of the ideas behind the masks, the preference for symbol over the symbolized, and such ideas are in parallel with the signifier/signified distinction, as well as the difference between character and personality but how it can be allowed to be taken to quite such lengths and with such seriousness is hard to fathom from this distance.
There can't be much doubt that Sailing to Byzantium, Byzantium, Among School Children and The Second Coming, amongst others, belong in any C20th canon, if canons are still allowed, and Ellman did go some way to explaining how they were arrived at but, heaven knows, I came away from the book feeling that I knew precious little more about the man than I did before. But if I'd been able to concentrate harder in the passages that detailed his esoteric theories, I'd know a lot more about some portentous, rickety old musings.
--
So, that was an unsatisfactory attempt to fill the latest void in my reading list. Very shortly, I won't need any such filler to pad out my studious nights as a few hundred poems will be on their way shortly from South, from which I am to pick 60. It will be like an easy version of being a Booker Prize judge, a job that has always seemed incomprehensibly beyond me.
But, in order to remain sane, I've got a copy of Sebastian Faulks' Where My Heart Used to Beat on its way.
--
And while reaction to the letters page of the TLS of a few weeks ago seems to have been left at a few cursory dismissals on Twitter - what do you have to do to get anybody interested - well, if you're Ben Elton, it's fine. Have an all-star cast and six half hour slots on a Monday night. But Upstart Crow has been worth sticking with. Ben's done his homework and has put some useful material in among some more obvious, and bawdy, jokes.
Perhaps the highlight so far was in last night's episode about the sonnets in which Shakespeare explains to his uncomprehending friends and family how 'prove' and 'love' are half-rhymes and thus better than full rhymes. They don't get it, of course, and won't have it.  But, thanks, Ben Elton, William Shakespeare and David Mitchell. And to a few of you that may or may not be reading this, there you are, it's just like I told you.
--
Whereas, don't quote me on this, unless it wins on Saturday.
A few years ago, I did a Derby preview, tipped Ruler of the World, lost confidence in it and removed the posting and then it won at 7/1.
It's fair to say that these days my interest in the turf is only when they put fences in the way to make it interesting. Flat racing is more about bloodstock, breeding, empires and world domination, not the novice hurdle at Fontwell Park.
And this year, of all years, the Derby is not a race to get heavily involved in. If evidence is often thin in these early classics, it is all the thinner this year because it appears wide open not because so many potentially great horses have staked their claims but because none of the trial races have provided anything convincing. It was only a couple of weeks ago that two fillies were among the favourites. Imagine that.
While the wisest advice might just be to follow Ryan Moore, who is the natural inheritor of Lester Piggott's position not only as having first pick of what to ride in the Derby but also as a reluctant communicator, I'll suggest Deauville as one that could easily get your money back each way if you don't like losing but could make it a respectable pay day if you're happy to take a chance.
Exactly how much of my profit so far this year is risked on it remains to be seen. 

A View from the Boundary,

which is what these column inches of miscellaneous reflections always used to be called.

County cricket is such a long-standing tradition that nobody involved in it seems to still remember why it happens. It is a venerable ritual that needs to be observed, so that people like the major in Fawlty Towers can look at the scores over breakfast.
Because Nottinghamshire were playing Hampshire, it was necessary for me to attend because I am a fervent supporter of my home town team and can name one or two of their players, although Derek Randall, Reg Simpson, Gary Sobers, Gamani Gooneseena and Basharat Hassan weren't actually playing today.
All the time Hants were struggling to 270 all out, it appeared that Notts were winning but as soon as they batted and were immediately 0 for 1, they weren't. When neither batting side, while batting, think they are winning, it can be slow going and that is what happened on a day when the weather contributed most to the day. There's only one thing worse than the cricket being not very interesting and that's when it stops completely.
Luckily, the wit and wisdom of the assembled group conjured fine entertainment from the newspapers and from the thin air at the back of their minds. So The Times crossword was filled in, possibly correctly- I don't know, followed by the Telegraph. The Call My Bluff  game was followed by an improvised Sausage Sandwich Game, copyright Danny Baker, where the result was Stenhousemuir 2 Patrick Thistle 0. Then, a traditional game of Today's Birthdays, in which contestants guess the age of those famous people whose birthday it is, e.g. Anatoly Karpov, 65; Lady Olga Maitland, 72, was followed by a new game that turned out to be most successful, guess the temperature from yesterday's World Weather which was further improved by guessing the location having been told the temperature and its initial letter. Although I had been first to get anything spot on by guessing the temperature in the Falkland Islands yesterday at 5, I was soon outgunned by Spenno in the reverse game, having guessed Mumbai was specifically as hot as the degrees stated, and it turned out to have been Marrakesh.
So, you can see how the English summer can be survived- not by the vicarious spectating of arcane sport but by doggedly getting all the value you can out of the newspaper while Hants and Notts battle grimly on over there in the sunshine, like, as it were, 'too bald men fighting over a comb'.
--
Meanwhile, I know by now it's time to think of which book to read next and order it because I'm nearly halfway through the latest. It is long overdue that I added Yeats to my poet's biographies and Richard Ellman's The Man and the Masks still looks like the best critical biography.
I've never been sure about Yeats, having been introduced to all such things when Eliot was regarded as god in C20th Poetry. I've felt I owed W.B. something ever since I changed my mind during the final exam at University, having intended to write about Eliot, saw the questions, liked the one on Yeats best and somehow, from somewhere, scribbled out a masterpiece.
I still haven't decided, his formative years having been difficult, the fashions of the fin de siecle for Madam Blavatsky and all kinds of baggy mysticism not having done him any favours - it's a good job he hadn't been a teenager in the 1960's- and one needs to give him more time. For a moment Ellman seems to make a good case for his dual personalities alongside Jekyll and Hyde and Dorian Gray and the difference between character and personality, which seems to prefigure the Ego and Id, but then Yeats reverts to type and involves himself in all the wrong things. But perhaps wrong things is all there were. I can't say that books on Eliot or Pound made them attractive figures either so there's plenty of time for Yeats to make a case for himself. It's not as if he doesn't have a great oeuvre to back him up and whenever was it that we had to like the poet anyway. Even though the fashion has by now swung decisively back to literary biography and away from the text and text alone as the object of appreciation, it is still very important to have written some great poems.