W. B. Yeats believed that a poet’s life should be an experiment in living. His poems fashion into memorable words the sometimes puzzling emotions that hover over important life events. Yeats’s remarkable work can clarify our own thinking about similar situations. Joseph M. Hassett’s Yeats Now: Echoing into Life extracts and distils the rich harvest of Yeats’s experiment. As Yeats’s biographer Roy Foster comments, Yeats Now is ‘a personal, quizzical, imaginative testament that 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’. This book is a wonderful companion to the work of this significant poet. Hassett’s writing provides an excellent frame of context through which to explore one of Ireland’s greatest poets.
